Most frontends (I don’t know any, really) doesn’t allow you to set a default language for your post. For that reason, a lot of frontends allow you to post without any language selected, while defaulting to English. But that is not universally true. Photon recently started requiring language to be selected and started defaulting to Undetermined language. This now creates unnecessary friction when the community doesn’t have it as allowed language and requires the user to select allowed language for every single post.

It really is a simple change on your end that will take you seconds, but can save a lot of time in the long run and some frustration for people that want to post in your communities.

On lemmy-ui frontend you can change it by going to community settings and under languages you can select multiple ones by holding Ctrl key.

P.S. This community is a great example of one that doesn’t allow Undetermined language.

  • BrikoXOPEnglish
    2•16 days ago

    lemmy-ui setting for languages is not exclusive for posting. It also determines what posts you will see. If you only select a single language, you will not see posts from other languages (including undetermined).

    And it defaults to English on lemmy-ui even if undetermined is an available language by instance/community if no language is selected, which is not ideal either. Undetermined has id = 0, English has id = 37, so it’s not based on numbered order.

    I feel like community sentiment and Lemmy team are in conflict about undetermined language. If communities that are not language specific are excluding it to create artificial friction, then the whole undetermined language should be removed from Lemmy software and user-defined defaults added to replace it, as other Fedi platform does.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•16 days ago

      lemmy-ui setting for languages is not exclusive for posting. It also determines what posts you will see. If you only select a single language, you will not see posts from other languages (including undetermined).

      Indeed, that’s why my settings are

      • Undetermined and English for my account
      • English only at the community level for the ones I mod

      That way I can still see Undetermined posts, but Spanish only speakers wouldn’t see posts from my communities

      And it defaults to English on lemmy-ui even if undetermined is an available language by instance/community if no language is selected, which is not ideal either.

      Are you sure? I noticed the opposite (all languages displayed by default), and I created this alt a few days ago

      • BrikoXOPEnglish
        1•16 days ago

        Are you sure? I noticed the opposite (all languages displayed by default), and I created this alt a few days ago

        Languages are displayed in the create post page, but by default it has no language selected, aka Select language. If you post like that, it will default to English id = 37 from my testing. Even if expanding the Select language shows other languages, like Undetermined with id = 0.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•16 days ago

          If you post like that, it will default to English id = 37 from my testing.

          Depends on the community settings, no?

          This post is Undetermined: https://feddit.org/post/2450630?scrollToComments=true

          I should maybe try in a new community but no time for that at the moment.

          So basically what you are saying is

          • account has default settings
          • community has default settings

          Account posts on the community would be in English?

          • BrikoXOPEnglish
            2•16 days ago

            There are 3 levels.

            1. Instance-level languages
            2. Account-level languages (can only select those from above tier)
            3. Community-level languages (can only select those from above tier)

            The issue is that account-level and community-level languages are not always accounted for by clients, so they allow posting without setting any. Then Lemmy logic interprets it as whatever default it has set. From my testing, it seems to English, but I haven’t studied the code to be certain.