UPDATE: Tom has now added the Undetermined language option to our instance. To make sure you can see the majority of Lemmy content from within your feddit.uk account, do the following:
Click your profile name - click settings - scroll down to the Languages box (not interface language) - hold down Ctrl (cmd on Mac) and select both English and Undetermined. On mobile browser: Tap the Languages box and make sure both are selected - scroll down and click save
You can also select any other languages which are beneficial to you.
If you don’t see everything listed in the box, try refreshing the page.
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Original Post
When viewing profile settings, you will see a box which says:
Warning: If you deselect Undetermined, you will not see most content.
On feddit.uk we currently have no selectable language option other than English. This means that (sometimes?) we will not see a lot of posts / comments on other instances / communities where the OP did not specifically select English before posting
See also: This Lemmy documentation under ‘Setting up your profile’
• Languages: Select the languages that you speak to see only content in these languages. This is a new feature and many posts don’t specify a language yet, so be sure to select “Undetermined” to see them.
Ideally, we need the ability to select English (or whatever language) AND undetermined - you can select multiple, as long as they are available.
When I view X community@instance from my lemmy.world account (with Undetermined language selected in profile settings), I can see all posts and comments. When I view the same community@instance from my feddit.uk account, there are missing posts and often 0 comments on everything. This needs addressing if possible!
Can probably unpin this now eh
I would if I could. I cringe every time I see my handle at the top of the homepage.
@tom@feddit.uk Could you un-feature my post now please? :)
Haha yeh done!
Something I’ve just noticed, is that my posts show “English” against them. Does this mean anyone who has their language set to “undetermined” won’t be able to see them? Will this affect community growth?
I’m not sure. Sometimes, even if you post a comment without specifically selecting English beforehand, Lemmy autodetects it and puts English. To be honest with you I haven’t managed to get my head around it. The language settings all seem very convoluted to me.
If they only have it set to “Undetermined”, then they probably won’t see it. However you can select multiple languages. So if they have both “English” and “Undetermined” then they will see posts with either of those.
In Jerboa I sometimes have issues where it won’t let me comment and gives an error about language, but Jerboa doesn’t let you select the language of your reply. On the website you can set the language and get around this error.
It’s just not cached yet, if you give it time it should work. I experienced the same with ChatGPT sublemmy on another instance but now it works just fine.
Iv set my profile settings to English as I only want to see English content anyway and my issues with commenting and posting on other instances seems to have been fixed.
I’d love to be able to add more languages nonetheless. I’m from Denmark, but I can’t really see much in the feddit.dk instance because I can’t see things in Danish.
Yeh sorry about that, have enabled all languages
I don’t think it’s anything to do with caching. It specifically says in settings and in the Lemmy documentation that if you don’t select Undetermined, you won’t see a lot of content. This isn’t about posting or commenting it’s about being able to see content. To be honest I am clueless about it all but it’s not ideal if we can’t see content on other instances / communities. I just felt it was worth bringing attention to in case it is an issue.
Ah ffs I completely misread that box
I read it as, if you select Undetermined you will not see most content, the double negative really threw me. So on the instance admin I selected our language as English which I’ll change to undetermined now as it might explain a lot of the federation issue we’ve been having.
Thanks Tom, all my subscribe requests at lemmy.ml have suddenly gone through as well so I’d say this has solved a bunch of things simultaneously!
You can have both! I think you need to hold ctrl or alt or something and select English and Undetermined. I saw it in a post somewhere but I’ve lost it now. I agree the double negative is very confusing! Glad you’ve seen this post.
Yeh you’re right that’s even less intuitive from a UX perspective Changed to both undetermined and English
Maybe consider a sticky post so that everyone knows to go into their profile settings and select BOTH English and Undetermined by holding down Ctrl (command key on Mac)? Or sticky this one and I’ll add an update to the bottom.
I’m not sure I follow. I see a list of numerous languages, and if I select them they don’t stay selected. I tried to remove one language that uses an unfamiliar writing system but that didn’t work either.
Also, I’m seeing all this interface in French, despite having set Opera to English as default, with French a third choice after German.
I’m a bit confused!
There’s two settings, one for ‘Interface Language’ and one for ‘Languages’ underneath. I think Interface Language needs setting to ‘Browser Default’. Underneath is the Languages list. You should be able to click on Undetermined, then scroll down to English, hold down Ctrl and click that too. If there are any other languages that you want to see, hold down Ctrl and click those as well - for example selecting German should allow you to see posts/comments which have been written in German. Each time you select one, it should turn blue. Then scroll down and click Save - above the Delete Account button
Other language options may be important in the future anyway. Say for example you are researching a trip to Madrid. You find some communities for Madrid but don’t see any posts because they are all in Spanish. If you could see them then you can always use a translation tool.
Granted for general browsing outside of that use case, I only want to see English.
Yeh I’ve just enabled them all sorry about the confusion, didn’t think selecting a language for the instance would be so restrictive.
