this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
144 points (84.3% liked)
Fediverse
17683 readers
13 users here now
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It makes sense to not use English if the target audience is known to not speak it, but it is often not the case.
English is the most commonly spoken language in the world, after all. To not use it, is to make the content less searchable and harder to understand for billions of people.
Over a billion of those people have learned it as their second language simply to understand and be understood by each other. Is it really that weird that those who can't be bothered to do the same get downvoted?
Except not everyone has learned english, not everyone can especially older people.
Lemmy has that feature built-in that communities can support arbitrary languages. If you don't want to see them you can literally just pick your languages in your profile, and it'll automatically ignore what you can't read.
A bit weird in practice, but it's intended from the start to be available in everyone's languages without having to make news-de, news-fr, news-es communities or have to rely on regional instances.
If we went with maximizing who can read your post then it should be in Chinese. The assumption that english is the default language for everything is very american.
What about "if the target audience is known to not speak it" part do you not understand?
It's one thing to have your little community in whatever language and post there.
It's another to show up in a very much international community and start posting in whatever random language you want. Or, worse, start replying to comments written in English using your language. Like this guy. Just... How do you even do that? Aren't you supposed to kind of speak English to even understand the content of a comment you're replying to? Why not respond using it, then?
I'm not a native English speaker. My friends aren't either. Yet we all use it for pretty much the same reason. And if you think you can just chime in, go "你的母亲是只仓鼠,你父亲满身接骨木的气味", and be both perfectly understood and not downvoted, you're either a troll or an idiot.