Loud Reminder:
Queer Mastodon was on this platform before Techbro Mastodon.
Stop fucking erasing us.
((and then asking where we are))
@thefishcrow im glad i follow the right people that i don't see this
also i literally never look at anything but my home
@Gaypow theres some stuff in my mentions about how new articles complelty erase queer mastodon in the article, and it was like that in the first place
im just so fucking tired
@Gaypow like a year ago when stuff was written, both queer mastodon and also the spanish and french waves were forgotten
im also still pissed with the language filter
@thefishcrow language filter?
@thefishcrow thats weird why would someone need that? i mean i guess i see that IDK i like seeing french on my timeline
IDK IM DUMB
@Gaypow @thefishcrow also how does it even work? Language detection is HARD and even Twitter gets it wrong a lot
Articles about mastodon are always like “neat idea but how will they monetize it?! No VC will ever fund a platform like this!” or techbros complaining about mastodon working as intended (giving a voice to people who aren’t them).
@fluffy i dont know since im not actually a programmer!
@thefishcrow I wonder if it just assumes things based on the locale of the instance, which is just plain wrong.
But yeah I guess it’s so hard to be an American who gets reminded there are non-English speakers on the Internet.
@Fuego @thefishcrow oh good thing nobody’s bilingual
@fluffy no i remember when it was implemented, it uses some language detection library which is actually pretty accurate i think?
@ashkitten presto, my tortilla has a unique genre.
@ashkitten sorry, had to do a thing. My point was just that English is so full of loanwords that I can't imagine any library having particularly accurate detection just because English screws everything up. :)
@fluffy idk probably
¿Donde estan los baños?
Puis j’aller aux toilettes?
I wonder how this toot will be classified.
@fluffy @ashkitten and then there are people who post the same thing in two languages in the same toot
how do you filter that? or discussions of one language in another?
@ashkitten @fluffy This is why I suggested it should be set by the author and detection only be used as a fallback, when the post does not have a language tag.
@grainloom @ashkitten or better yet, don’t filter based on languages and instead embrace the fact the internet is diverse and multicultural. Maybe do Twitter’s behavior and try to detect the language and give a translation link if it’s not the same as yours.
@fluffy @ashkitten that would make the UI cluttered and I don't want my private posts to be sent to Google or Bing or any other 3rd party translation service
@ashkitten @fluffy filtering languages is perfectly fine, afaik no one wants to read badly translated posts and no one wants posts they can't read cluttering up their timelines and since no one can magically learn new languages in an instant we'll just have to live with the thought that we are missing out.
If you still want to preserve the _sense_ of having a multilingual feed, the UI could simply make a note about it.
Eg.: "287 toots filtered"
@grainloom @ashkitten sure, I’m mostly just worried that it’s going to filter stuff based on misdetection or bad metadata, but also I’m in favor of anything that reduces the anglicentrism of the Internet.
@fluffy @ashkitten Well, I don't see better options than user controlled tagging. If it's properly exposed in the toot composer UI thingy then people will know that it's happening and the tag they use matters.
It's sorta similar to how the privacy selector works or how CWs work.
I think overall it would make people browse the FTL more.
@ashkitten @fluffy Tbh I'd actually like the auto-translate version if it didn't involve 3rd party services. 😞
@fluffy @grainloom i mean the point is that it's an option
@ashkitten @grainloom well, sure. This was the continuation of a thread, maybe read back for context.
@grainloom @ashkitten @fluffy you can see the a bit of chatter of how the language detection works here https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/2704 (it's far down) it's confidence based, deemed to be accurate enough by many measures and will tag things it can't figure out as "unknown" and won't filter it.
It's not just English users wanting to filter out other languages, by the way. Not to mention it's opt-in.
I talk about #conlangs like #tokipona, #lojban and #esperanto with my friends. Often together in the same post. Which box should we check for made up languages? :)
@fluffy @thefishcrow
I'm not an American, and English is not my native language, but sometimes I want to follow someone who posts in eg. French and English. I can't read French, but find that person's English posts interesting. Unfortunately, following them would mean my timeline gets flooded with posts in a language I don't understand, which makes it harder to find the posts that I can understand. A working lang filter, perhaps with options to tag language when posting, would be helpful IMO.
@fluffy @thefishcrow it uses he dropdown in that picture above the filter to determine your language.