How do you define "normally"? You may wish to clarify as "civilly".
Me? I'm fine with it, but may block it if it's too active, as I likely wouldn't understand the posts.
Pretty much. The issue with foreign languages is that they’re impossible for an admin to actually administer. Because the admin has no idea if the posts are breaking rules. For all you know, a foreign community could be focused on sharing recipes, or could be focused on sharing Neo Nazi dogwhistles. And you’d have no way of distinguishing between the two without basically learning a new language.
The issue with foreign languages is that they’re impossible for an admin to actually administer.
Emphasis mine. That's bullshit. You got at least three resources at hand:
- Machine translation.
- Context.
- Community help.
Note that you should be already doing #2 and #3 even in a monolingual instance or community; failure to do either means failure as a mod or admin.
For all you know, a foreign community could be focused on sharing recipes, or could be focused on sharing Neo Nazi dogwhistles. And you’d have no way of distinguishing between the two without basically learning a new language.
Besides the three resources that I mentioned, remember that dogwhistling Nazi are trying to promote an ideology. They're likely to beeline towards the majority language of the instance/comm, because they want to be heard. Posting a dogwhistle in a language that practically nobody speaks is pointless.
If it it were my instance, as in I run it and mod it, I would boot them. I can't moderate a language I don't understand.
If it's an instance I have a profile on but it's not mine to run or moderate, I don't care. I would mute it if there were a lot of posts.
Yeah, it would suck to find out there was a bunch of nazis building a community on your server, and you just didn't have any idea it was happening.
Unfortunately I would just block the community from my feed because I would be unable to understand the content or interact with it. That being said there is no reason not to make community's in other languages so even more people can connect.
Sure...if by "normally", we mean that I will block or filter those communities as soon as I see them.
Not out of any malice or resentment. I just don't want to see communities where I won't be able to even read the titles, nor participate in comments.
Yup. No point in seeing posts you can't understand or interact with.
What's the normal reaction?
Also, there have been non-english speaking communities on my instance since before I joined.
If I'm just scrolling and notice it once or twice I do nothing, but if I see a lot of it I block it unless I speak said language.
I would love it if Lemmy had direct support for me to tell it what languages I speak and I'll never see communities in languages I don't speak.
Well it does but the problem is that most people don't actually fill out the language field.
And if you tell it to hide undefined then it hides like 99% of posts.
What needs to happen is that it needs to actually work out the language and then put the tag on
On the spare instance that I use, the language settings are simply not taken into account. I choose to display posts in my language, save, but the settings return to default and only english is displayed.
I'd be fine with it as long as I could understand the language for moderation purposes. As the admin, I'm ultimately responsible for what's hosted on my systems.
If it was a Spanish-speaking community, I could handle that and run the edge cases through a translator. Any other language, I'd ask them to post in English or relocate the community to an instance that is primarily in their language.
Again, my only reservations are because of needing to moderate and know what I'm hosting. As long as at least one of the admins is fluent enough in the language to moderate and deal with issues, I'd allow it.
You as an admin can set which languages you accept content from on your instance, FYI.
That's basically just a label. You can post in any language and leave the language field set to undefined or set it to the language of the server. It doesn't enforce anything.
Most people just leave it set to "undefined" which sets it to the home server's default language. The language labels in Lemmy are one of those "good idea, bad execution" kind of things.
I'd just block it if I can't understand the language.
I'm on a German instance so I guess that's part of it.
There's almost certainly non-english speaking communities on my instance since its one of the biggest and most popular. I wouldnt react at all
Define "normal" for that case.
For me, if it is in my native tongue I will see whether it is worth being followed, and any other language will be banned to avoid clutter.
I'm on a Netherlands instance so occasionally I see some Dutch content but I just skip over it. It doesn't bother me at all tbh.
I don't care about what's happening on my instance, as long as they don't start blocking communities for dumb reasons like lemmy.world did. That's actually the reason why I left that instance. I don't care about foreign communities popping up on my instance though, I only care about the ones I subscribed to.
Which communities were blocked on lemmy.world?
They blocked !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !piracy@lemmy.ml and !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com. This post sums it up pretty well though: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2146522.
I'm an admin of mine and I don't care, if you want a non-English community there, go ahead!
I would enjoy it and not be xenophobic, although I may block it eventually to change my information density back to mostly things I understand
If it's French I'll visit the post and comment something trolly about their food in English. Cos French.
If it's German I'll comment something about having the correct forms & papers to exist.
Polish I'll comment the only Polish I know: "Kurwa dobrze takk"
Any other language I'd ignore it.
I will act irrationally
what is the normal response? I speak and read English, exclusively. if I care about something, I have a translator in the browser but images dont get translated. enough "foreign spam" shows up and it's getting downvoted and then blocked.
Do people actually use the term 'foreign spam for this'? Don't they realise they're foreigners themselves?
on a majority english language site?
I can't understand jack shit, I would block it.
Language tags exist in post format, so unless it's marked improperly it wouldn't effect me any way; why not?
I like being exposed to languages that I do not know, so, is be happy to see it.
"My instance" as "the instance I'm subscribed to": I might interact with it if it's in a language that I speak, otherwise I leave it alone.
"My instance" as "a hypothetical instance, that I would be the admin of": if I had my instance odds are that I'd be tweaking its rules to promote linguistic diversity on first place, so the appearance of speaking communities outside the default language (that would likely not be English in my instance, but either Portuguese or Italian) would show that I'm doing a good job.
Some people raise the concern of administration; but frankly? It looks for me like a strawman, not an actual problem. Trolls are attention seekers, so they'd likely post in the majority language; and other types of rule breaking scale with the size of the linguistic community in question, so when they become an actual concern you'll be able to recruit help anyway.
Trolls are attention seekers, but troublemakers tend to be focused on a particular action.
For example if somebody is stirring tensions in Sweden. They're going to post in Swedish even if it's not the most popular language on the instance because they don't care about anybody else. There's no benefit to me to risk it, so it's not exactly a strawman arguement, there's a very legitimate reason not to allow it.
Also they can go make their own instance if it's really that much of a problem, but I suspect they won't need to, I suspect they'll be able to find a instance that supports their language. So again where's the benefit in me allowing it?
Trolls are attention seekers, but troublemakers tend to be focused on a particular action.
For other types of troublemakers, check the rest of the very sentence that you're referring to.
Although... frankly, given your lack of basic reading comprehension, coupled with other people are raising the same points that you are, I'm not bothering with your comments further.
It doesn't affect me in the slightest.
