FediTips has moved!May 16, 2022

Little headsup, Mastodon developers seem to be testing a language selector in the posting interface (see attached image).

The idea is you set the language you're posting in which will make it easier for other people to filter your post out if they don't speak it.

You can already set your default language in the Preferences/Settings section, but the idea of this new feature is to let you optionally change the setting for each particular message. This is handy if you toot in several languages.

I have no idea if/when this will be rolled out, the developers' instances often get test features like this.

#Mastodon

Show threadFediTips has moved!May 16, 2022

p.s. I'm guessing this is also because a lot of people leave their post language setting as English even if they don't post in English.

There are two language settings on Mastodon: your interface language and your default posting language. The interface language is what you see on the interface, but the posting language setting is what your posts tell the language filter. (So, if you have it set to English the filter will treat your posts as English even if you use a different language.)

As well as helping multilingual people, this feature (if it is rolled out) will hopefully make people more aware of what setting their posting language default is, which will then make the language filters work better.

Show threadmergergMay 16, 2022
@feditips yeah I'll have mine set to only show me English and Spanish posts and then I'll read a sentence of a post and suddenly stop understanding it and realize it was in German the whole time
Show threadpiece of shit garbage whore
@mergerg @feditips is that my fault
May 16, 2022 at 7:35pmWeb
Show threadmergergMay 16, 2022
@miracleorange @feditips no I've actually never seen u post in German, do u do that often?
maybe I should learn German it seems like all the cool ppl speak it (plus I kinda wanna move to Germany)
Show threadpiece of shit garbage whoreMay 16, 2022

@mergerg @feditips not often, but I had a lil exchange with someone in German a few hours ago

it's actually an interesting language for a native English speaker because it basically shows you where English came from (because English is a germanic language), and because of that, it's not as difficult to learn as other languages either because there are a lot of cognates and similar grammar structures