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.
Putting more work on the admin running the server, that’s a great solution for someone who doesn’t have to do the extra work.
I think that the function of translating posts and messages, as in Mastodon, would facilitate the moderation of foreign communities.
Right but it has to be automatic. It has to detect that the language isn’t in whatever language I speak and then add a little link I can click to translate it. Like how YouTube comment works.
If I have to copy paste every single comment into Google translate it’s just not worth the time and effort. Especially since they can almost certainly find an instance where the moderator does speak their language.
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.
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.
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.
What’s the normal reaction?
Also, there have been non-english speaking communities on my instance since before I joined.
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.
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
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.
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 can’t understand jack shit, I would block it.
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.
It doesn’t affect me in the slightest.
“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.
