this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Fedigrow

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Most frontends (I don't know any, really) doesn't allow you to set a default language for your post. For that reason, a lot of frontends allow you to post without any language selected, while defaulting to English. But that is not universally true. Photon recently started requiring language to be selected and started defaulting to Undetermined language. This now creates unnecessary friction when the community doesn't have it as allowed language and requires the user to select allowed language for every single post.

It really is a simple change on your end that will take you seconds, but can save a lot of time in the long run and some frustration for people that want to post in your communities.

On lemmy-ui frontend you can change it by going to community settings and under languages you can select multiple ones by holding Ctrl key.

P.S. This community is a great example of one that doesn't allow Undetermined language.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

but can save a lot of time in the long run and some frustration for people that want to post in your communities.

On the other hand, it will most likely mean that people will just default to post without any language. And if no one does it, then why bother with the option at all?

My feeling is that the "right" way to fix this is by improving the client, instead of just making things completely relaxed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's a matter of opportunity cost. If 10 seconds of work once can save 5 seconds per post, why wouldn't you do it?

Sure, long term, all clients allowing setting default language for all posts would be ideal, but that has a lot higher opportunity cost.

And Undetermined is a selected language (id = 0). English is (id = 37).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

why wouldn’t you do it?

Personally? because I don't really care about comments and posts from people who think that 5 seconds to select an option is too much time.

Some friction is a good thing. If having to select the language to complete the post works as a filter, then you can bet that the ones being caught in that are the ones who are less likely to add anything meaningful or thoughtful to the discussion.