These anglos also demand we use their anglicized pronouns thus reducing trasinscneach identity to a concretized gender ideal within the linguistic hegemony of American Anglo queer theory. Truly disturbing colonial power dynamics at play. Díchoilínigh ár gcroíthe, díchoilínigh ár bhforainmneacha.
I don't really have an opinion on whether hexbear should allow other languages. The reason that many web forum only allow one language is because having other languages can be difficult to moderate. You sort of have to have a moderator that speaks the language to see if site rules are broken.
Honestly, if a little more work for moderators is what it takes to be accessible for the great many people who cannot or do not wish to write in English, then the anti-imperialist stance is to prioritize accessibility for the users over the convenience of the moderators. If the mods are monolingual anglophones then that alone is a failing of this site.
It's also important to not exaggerate how difficult it is to moderate multilingual websites in this day and age.
I think it's also important not to understate how difficult it is to moderate multilingual websites. Translation software is not perfect in even very closely related languages, and even the latest translation AI misses a lot of subtext. So without being a fluent speaker in a language, along with knowledge of relevant cultural context, you'll never accurately read the tones and full message in a piece of text. Certainly not to the point of being an effective moderator.
It would be super duper cool if hexbear supported other languages, but unless we have enough speakers of <x> language for it to be a functioning community with its own fluent moderators, I don't see it being practical (maybe we do?? that would be a neat surprise).
Alright, so first of all, you're honestly probably way more likely to wrongly dismiss a report or wrongly remove a post due to not understanding the subtext and cultural nuances of a post in English than you are a post in a language you don't speak, just because of the proportions between English-language content and content in other languages — and it's not like people are just using machine translation blindly, or like the reports themselves can't provide context, too. Second of all, if you do wrongly dismiss a report or wrongly remove a post, then users are able to complain, and if you're proven to have made the wrong decision you should be able to undo that decision. That might be a little inconvenient, but that's just how moderation is sometimes.
I think it is in any case profoundly silly to believe that this very specific and frankly broadly inconsequential problem should be treated as more important than making the website more accessible to speakers of different languages. The facts of the matter are that there are many ways to be a multilingual website, and the worst moderation that we could do with non-English languages is still way better than the content moderation on the social media platforms that speakers of these languages already readily use.
Having not moderated in spaces outside my own language, I can't speak with significant authority on the matter. We just seem to differ on how difficult, and consequentially effective, we each think that would be.
If we can find, or attempted, a way to effectively do it, then I'm all for it, I totally agree that being accessible to speakers of other languages is an important goal and would be a huge boon!
i don't understand what the 'language' tab is for, we didn't used to have one and there's no rules about posting in specific languages.
It's always frustrated me how the only languages in the language selection drop-down on Hexbear are English and "undetermined", but if you select "undetermined" your post won't be created. I think this is because Hexbear wasn't originally a Lemmy instance, and so when Hexbear converted its software to Lemmy, language selection ended up being one of the features that was fucked.
I really should consider just switching over to Grad, because it's already happened to me that someone replied to me in another language, and then I just couldn't read that reply in the thread page unless I went to the other instance, on Hexbear it just got stuck in an endless loop of "loading 1 reply".
I don't really care obviously, I'm just having the craic.
The language tags don't really do anything currently (maybe they will in a future release, e.g. 'Filter by language')
It should be easy to detect language automatically instead of making the user choose it. There are established ways of doing that with n-grams.
The tags don't do anything...? Maybe I was wrong to assume that that bug from the other day was due to the language tag.
We do technically support (viewing at least) other languages! but the default setting for new accounts is (or at least was, I haven't made one in a bit), only selecting English and Undetermined on the user settings page. And that setting does affect things, it's not completely a no-op.
It's all a bit of a confusing mess, but there's nothing stopping you from going to the profile page and selecting the first entry in the list, scrolling all the way to the bottom, and Shift-clicking the last option in the list, and pressing save, then you should see all the language options when you compose a post or comment. It might not let you post though. I'll test
The thing is, that profile setting also controls what language posts you see in your feed, so people with the default "English,Undetermined" will not see any posts you make in other languages.
I know it did actually seem to work because there was a new user at one point a while back who accidentally touched the language setting on their profile and ended up selecting only "undetermined" and was posting into the void, couldn't view anyone else's posts/comments
It seems to me that maybe the more reasonable default would be to allow all languages by default and let people set their own filters. There are some potential issues there but I honestly think in practice it would not be a problem at all since the community is small and tight-knit. But in the end it's not like the admins are going to stop you from posting in other languages now afaik?
Edit: right I guess that was the whole point of the post. Yeah I tested and it won't let you post on hexbear communities except in english
But you can change your viewing settings and post to other instances' comms in other languages, from hexbear.net
I mean, both the word for "language" from bahasa and the other language I spoke come from sanskrit, but no...
I recognised the Malayo-Polynesian family, so I'm proud of myself
