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".
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?
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
Wait I could've just done that the whole time????!!!!