this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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Hi All,

On some francophone communities, ou friend @[email protected] has run a couple of tests to understand how does language tag work in community with a default language. See that thread (En Français) for details.

The interesting part is that the behaviour changes based on which instance you post from (I believe all the tests have been done /c hosted by jlai.lu ) To summarize if the community default language is french a post from Lemmy.ca or Blahaj would be automatically tagged as in french while a post from SJW and lemmy.ml won't get automatically a language tag.

I haven't run all the test by myself and just agreed to be the messenger as someone using SJW. No idea whether it's just about setting a flag user-side, or whether it's a very specific lemmy version which enable this discussion.

A short note on language tags too. Not only, they avoid to deal with that frustrated person downvoting content they don't understand. But I've read a nice Mastodon thread about how they matter for visually impaired user who need their screen-reader to know which language they read. So they're very relevant.

Finally, while I'm complaining to our beloved great admins. I've seen that I tried to write that post in French first, but was blocked due to language setting, c'est dommage pour une instance bilingue

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The automatic language tag should only depend on the community language settings and user language settings. Specifically it will build the intersection of both, and if the result only contains one item (excluding "undetermined"), that is used as the post language. The instance doesnt matter at all. And there havent been any changes in this area in a while, so there should be no difference between 0.19.x versions.

I thought maybe the community language isnt federated properly but its identical on all mentioned instances. Also @[email protected] mentioned that French is enabled in user settings. There is clearly a bug but I cant think what else might be causing it.

Anyway please report such bugs directly on the issue tracker, otherwise I might not find out about it at all.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Hey, Thanks for coming here. My concern before going tot the issue tracker is that it seems to work on some instance and not on some other. so it was not clear whether it's an instance specific problem or a software issue. hence firstly a discussion here.

If necessary I can try to open a ticket on the github.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Finally, while I’m complaining to our beloved great admins. I’ve seen that I tried to write that post in French first, but was blocked due to language setting, c’est dommage pour une instance bilingue

Woops. It appears this community was set to English as the default language. I just enabled Francais in the settings.

I haven’t run all the test by myself and just agreed to be the messenger as someone using SJW. No idea whether it’s just about setting a flag user-side, or whether it’s a very specific lemmy version which enable this discussion.

We will have to look into this. I assume you would prefer that the posts do get automatically tagged as French. Hopefully it is a setting on our side and not some type of bug.

The language settings on Lemmy generally need some work to make them more intuitive, imo. New users are often confused by them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

We will have to look into this. I assume you would prefer that the posts do get automatically tagged as French

If the community has a default language yes, it would be great to have tagged automatically in the default language

The language settings on Lemmy generally need some work to make them more intuitive, imo. New users are often confused by them.

Indeed, this isn't intuitive (and something you find on the fedi, but less on mainstream social media). Also when using the wrong Language, Lemmy doesn't return any error but just refuse to accept the post. Which is a great way to confuse anyone.

Thanks for looking at it