Solely because I can’t read anything but English, I keep blocking foreign language communities as its just noise for me. But I have selected Undefined/English as my languages in settings.
It seems the language choice is never used by communities and posts? All of the .de instance posts seem to be “undefined” language. If they selected a specific language which matches their post language, it wouldn’t show up on my feed, right?
And currently there isn’t a way to block whole instances as a user, as far as I understand.
Will I have to just continuously hide foreign language communities as a user?
I’m not suggesting defederating or anything like that, just making my own feed less “noisy”
I’m new to Lemmy and on my first day trying to get to grips with it, I couldn’t post a comment because the Community wouldn’t allow the language (I was posting in English and all the other comments on the post were in English, and my language settings are set to Undefined and English). The whole language selection is actually a blocker to engagement at times.
Problem is that finding the language from the rolling menu is quite annoying, and as you usually write in language you axpect members of the community would understand, it’s easier to left it ‘undefined’.
I know at least when I’m posting on kbin instances, undefined isn’t really an option – if you don’t set the language, the post won’t go through.
On other fediverse instances, there’s actually auto-detection of language as an option, followed by auto-translation. I think the lemmy devs are up to their armpits in alligators at the moment, but I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually both features come to lemmy once things calm down.
I found that the “language selection” box was bugged on desktop and wouldn’t actually apply my settings, but when I tried it on a mobile browser, it worked and I no longer see really any foreign language posts.
You can double check if it worked by trying to type a post/comment and then hitting the “select language” box. If only your selected languages appear, it worked.
It would help if Instances/Communities would set the expected language and you could change it so the default isn’t Undetermined.
I don’t know if that’s possible, I manage neither.