1y ago

People speaking languages with a small population on Lemmy, how do you deal with the dilemma of posting in English or in your other language?

Basically, that's it.

I'm a French speaker, so I try to participate mainly on the French speaking communities such as !forumlibre@jlai.lu, !rance@jlai.lu, !cineseries@jlai.lu, but the issue is that apart from the 2-3 top ones, the others are usually very quiet.

I know it's a chicken and egg problem (as you need content for people to come and participate), but for instance with movies, I'm always torn between posting the content in the French-speaking community, or the much larger !movies@lemm.ee, where I know that the audience is much bigger. Same for science, history, most topics actually.

I don't expect anyone to have a magical formula (the most obvious solution being just having more speakers of that language on Lemmy), but I was curious to see if other people in the same situation had insights to share.

41 comments

I’m Dutch. The internet (and PCs in general) were for a long time an English first thing here in the Netherlands, except for news sites. So me not seeing Dutch content on Lemmy doesn’t bother me at all, since I’m used to only consume and engage in English on the internet. Also Dutch speaking internet communities tend to lean right, the crazy kind, so I rather avoid that.
- Swede here, and the same thing. Grew up with the internet being in English. Don't think it was until the arrival of social media in the early 2000's when Swedish content and discussions started becoming readily available.
- Also Dutch speaking internet communities tend to lean right, the crazy kind, so I rather avoid that.
  Vervelend om te horen. Ik probeer ook af en toe mijn Nederlands te oefenen, hopelijk komen er meer gecentreerde gemeenschappen
  
  feddit.nl heeft wat Nederlandse gemeenschappen (bijvoorbeeld !thenetherlands@feddit.nl) die normaal zijn, maar ze zijn niet echt actief

I always go with English when the topic allows it. Why limit yourself to people that speak a certain language when it's irrelevant to the topic?
- Because it just feels different to speak the language you speak at home? I'm working in English all day, I don't mind using the language, but I also like to speak French, each of them feels different.
  
  I guess I just don't care about that.
  If the entire German language was abolished and replaced with English, I'd welcome it.
- @caliash @Servais
  Why limit yourself to people that speak a certain language when it's irrelevant to the topic?
  Speaking english is also limiting oneself to people that speak a given language.
  
  Not in the same way since English is pretty much the lingua franca of the internet.

I think there are like <10 people on Lemmy who speak my native language 😅 I don't really mind just using English, though. I've always thought that languages are cool as a cultural thing, but as a pragmatic approach to day to day communication, I think it would be quite nice to just use a single language.
- Hello, thank you for your work on Lemm.ee and your insight!
  As an Estonian, do you think Estonian might disappear as a language as English would become more and more prevalent in the country? I know Latvia is a bit worried about this, Latvia has lost 13% of its population in the last 20 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amqp2gU9634
  
  All languages will eventually disappear, it's just a question of timescales, right? In any case, the timescale for Estonian to disappear is for sure longer than our lifetimes (barring some apocalypse scenarios).
  I know many people are worried about Estonian disappearing some time in the future, but I'm not so sentimental about it personally. Maybe this is short-sighted, but I don't think cultural/historical/etc things need to be kept alive artificially - if such things are useful, they will stay alive on their own merit. If not, then we can always appreciate them through history books later on.

I'm Norwegian and we're hardly represented here at all. Nor do I actually post much content anyway.
- what about teaming up with the Danes? if lore is to be believed, the written languages are quite similar

People who use reddit/Lemmy from CZ are usually fluent in English and tech savvy. So there is no need for my language.
On the other hand on reddit there were some pretty big communities.
- I see, so as Reddit was ten years ago.
  By the way, any active Czech community related to the country ? I just noticed it is missing from the sidebar
  
  Nothing that I know of. Slovaks has community but it is pretty inactive.

Il est un peu dommage que la communauté francophone soit si petite dans le fedivers et la fédéralisation de jlai.lu ne me semble pas bien marcher. La communauté de ma langue native (allemand) est plus grande ici, mais ils sont tous trop négatifs et les communauté anglophone sont souvent trop ricaine pour moi.
À mon avis la diversité linguistique est une bonne chose mais si l'UE décide un jour de parler une seule langue je suis d'accord avec tous les langues européenes sauf l'anglais.
- si l'UE décide un jour de parler une seule langue je suis d'accord avec tous les langues européenes sauf l'anglais.
  Si l'UE devait décider d'une seule langue, je pense que ça ne devrait pas être la langue nationale d'un état membre. Une langue construite comme l'Esperanto serait plus appropriée à mon avis, et aurait en tout cas plus de chance d'être acceptée par les différents états/peuples.
  
  ça ne devrait pas être la langue nationale d’un état membre.
  Honnêtement maintenant que le Royaume-Uni est dehors, s'il n'y a que les Irlandais et les Maltais qui sont privilégiés, ça me va. L'espéranto est intéressant mais trop compliqué à mettre en place, l'anglais est déjà là et parlé par pas mal de monde en Europe.
- Il est un peu dommage que la communauté francophone soit si petite dans le fedivers et la fédéralisation de jlai.lu ne me semble pas bien marcher.
  Oui, c'est souvent ce qu'on regrette, les modérateurs des subs français et allemands ont gérer les choses de manière très différente.
  Quels soucis rencontres-tu avec la fédération? Ca a été un peu chaotique récemment, mais normalement là ça devrait marcher.

I look for national communities to discuss topic relevant to my country, other than that I'm all for the broader reach allowed by a more international approach.
Yes I'm excluding those that don't speak English in 2024, but that's just an accidental plus.
- why would that be a plus?
  
  It was a bit of a joke, but also English is very accessible these days and lacking a basic knowledge of it is more a matter of lack of interest for the maters of the world at large than being deprived of the chance to learn it.
  I'd be excluding way more people speaking in my native languadge anyway.

Bonjour. I was native english but like to read in french, however for me it’s slower to write, so I'm less likely to reply. I think we should assume more tolerance of mixed languages within discussions, that way we would see how much diversity is out there.
Actually most kids in the world - not just in Europe - grow up multilingual - , as in most of India, Africa etc. there are different local and national languages, and often mixed parents. The anglosphere is the exception, not the rule. I think the biggest challenge for the fediverse is to break out beyond Europe + North-america (+Japan - but that community is also a separate bubble), to do that we have to solve this issue.
By the way it helps to select 'scaled' as default algorithm, to see more of the smaller communities. But it would be nice to be able to blend discussion from communities from different instances relating to same (or similar) news item.
- Merci pour ton message, très intéressant!
  You indeed have a point about multilingual being the norm on other continents. Hopefully that is slowly going to change with the newer generations more exposed to other languages.
  
  Au Québec, we already parlent franglais donc ce n'est pas a problem for nous! 😉

Native English speaker here that is conversational in Spanish and learning Filipino.
I sometimes and interested in what people of other languages have to say, but if there is not an easy way to translate it in the app, I’ll just skip it.
Don’t really comes down to who you want your audience to be.
Since the app I use for Lemmy does not have translation built in, I’ll never read what you post in French. If it’s in Spanish, I’ll attempt to read it.
- This is interesting. Are there apps that translate? Latest version of Libre Wolf on my PC tries to translate web pages for me. But I think that only does 1 language at a time.
  The idea of a "babelfish" app for social media seems like it could open conversion up across languages. I wonder if anyone is working on this.
  It would be great to be able to converse with any group in all of their languages.
  
  I guess even with translators, there are cultural references and jokes that are difficult to convey. Could still be interesting!
  
  There are a lot of different translations apps out there. iOS even has translation built into the OS. I’m not sure why it’s not a standard feature in these apps. Maybe there isn’t a decent api for it.
  I think meta text has a translate feature, but it’s not obvious to find.

41 comments