Lemmy language options are both confusing, and don't do what they're intended to do

3 years ago by downpunxx to c/fediverse

Granted, the warning says clearly "If you deselect Undetermined, you will not see most content", which places the onus on the individual user, as apposed to logic built into Lemmy on which posts/comments can be viewed, while also leaving it to each user to have to weed out alternate languages for their views which are incorrectly set. This is indeed leading to many posts simply not appearing (as designed and intended), which is less than ideal when trying to grow a user base/community.

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astigma 30 points 3 years ago

If you're on desktop you can hold ctrl and make multiple language selections. I have undetermined and English selected.

As to why this is even a thing that needs to be set I have no idea either.

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Kichae 14 points 3 years ago

The intent is to label content by language so that people can easily filter out languages they can't read. The presumption that English, say, is the default language because the big websites are all US based doesn't really hold in the Fediverse, where a lot of users, historically, were from Europe.

But the feature's just kind of... broken right now, though.

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JohnEdwa 8 points 3 years ago

The Lemmy UI is terrible and as tagging isn't actually mandatory in Lemmy, most posts just fall under "undetermined".
Kbin has mandatory tagging - yay - but the list has maybe only like a dozen languages and I don't Kbin has the filtering implemented anyway. Though I have to say having Finnish as an option but no Swedish does make just a tiny bit happy.

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Thade780 2 points 3 years ago

The intent is to label content by language

That means I should select the language I write into for all the posts/comments I write? Wow.

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marcos 7 points 3 years ago

you can hold ctrl and make multiple selections

Just to point that this is the default and "obvious" behavior for lists since the 90's (or, rather the 80's if you count Unixes GUIs). Yet almost nobody knows it for some reason (probably because it's not obvious at all, but IDK).

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shroomato 2 points 3 years ago

Multiselect lists are outdated design, requiring prior knowledge of what they are and the use of keyboard (that you might not have if using a touchscreen device) for a simple interaction with a webpage is terrible UX. The issue is that it's how browsers render them by default, a 'proper' multiselect requires a bunch of css and javascript.

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ElectroVagrant 1 point 3 years ago

Yet almost nobody knows it for some reason (probably because it’s not obvious at all, but IDK).

That and I think in many cases people opt for the ol' box select when trying to select multiple options in a GUI, even if it's in list view.

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downpunxx 2 points 3 years ago

yeah, that's what i'm sayin

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