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.
This was done to have proper tagging of the language used.
Lemmy UI will automatically match the community language with yours to find a match, English in this case. I never have to select English when posting here
I would rather have the front ends have a default language than allow Undetermined for the community but we can of course discuss
lemmy-ui setting for languages is not exclusive for posting. It also determines what posts you will see. If you only select a single language, you will not see posts from other languages (including undetermined).
And it defaults to English on lemmy-ui even if undetermined is an available language by instance/community if no language is selected, which is not ideal either. Undetermined has id = 0, English has id = 37, so it's not based on numbered order.
I feel like community sentiment and Lemmy team are in conflict about undetermined language. If communities that are not language specific are excluding it to create artificial friction, then the whole undetermined language should be removed from Lemmy software and user-defined defaults added to replace it, as other Fedi platform does.
Indeed, that's why my settings are
That way I can still see Undetermined posts, but Spanish only speakers wouldn't see posts from my communities
Are you sure? I noticed the opposite (all languages displayed by default), and I created this alt a few days ago
Languages are displayed in the create post page, but by default it has no language selected, aka
Select language. If you post like that, it will default to English id = 37 from my testing. Even if expanding theSelect languageshows other languages, like Undetermined with id = 0.Depends on the community settings, no?
This post is Undetermined: https://feddit.org/post/2450630?scrollToComments=true
I should maybe try in a new community but no time for that at the moment.
So basically what you are saying is
Account posts on the community would be in English?
There are 3 levels.
The issue is that account-level and community-level languages are not always accounted for by clients, so they allow posting without setting any. Then Lemmy logic interprets it as whatever default it has set. From my testing, it seems to English, but I haven't studied the code to be certain.
I'll do some testing when I have time later this week
I'd bet a supermajority of users only ever post in one language though.
With the amount of German and French speakers (among others), I'm not so sure