Do I need to choose a language when posting on Lemmy?
I often manually choose English every time I post, but do I actually have to do this? Does this affect the ability of other users to view my posts, or am I wasting my time by taking this extra step on most posts and comments?
If a user doesn’t want to see an English post, accurately tagging your post allows them to filter it. So it’s a matter of being nice, but not strictly necessary to tag your post correcly.
This is one of the things that could have been a nice feature, but the devs never fixed it as far as I know.
It should let you set a default, and options in the list should include 'detect from browser settings', and 'most recently selected'. (Default should be that one probably, but on the very first post it should detect it automatically.)
If they had done that, and encouraged the same in apps and other clients, then filtering by language would actually work and not exclude the vast majority of posts.
Afaik new versions of Lemmy should figure out the language by itself. This, however, can be wrong sometimes.
I see, so it's more of a recommended field to aid in filtering but not required for my post to reach most users.
Precisely
Yes, many of us do filter by language, because I can't read Korean nor Italian. However, I kept undetermined in my setting.
I believe it also helps people using screen reader to have the proper setting when reading lemmy, especially in a multi lingual social network such as here
At one point, it was suggested to not label posts with English if in English. With is my attempt at explaining the current state.
Really, it the setting is important, it shouldn't be allowed to be undefined.
There's a language selection option in your preferences. Some people may have that set up to not show "undetermined" although at least on my instance the interface warns that people won't see most content if they deselect that.
I never select a language when commenting, though have done so a few times before (not recently) when starting new threads. It seems that sometimes this is automatically determined, although I can't tell what this depends on.
It makes it so people who don't know English don't see it.