Lemmy language options are both confusing, and don't do what they're intended to do
Granted, the warning says clearly "If you deselect Undetermined, you will not see most content", which places the onus on the individual user, as apposed to logic built into Lemmy on which posts/comments can be viewed, while also leaving it to each user to have to weed out alternate languages for their views which are incorrectly set. This is indeed leading to many posts simply not appearing (as designed and intended), which is less than ideal when trying to grow a user base/community.
If you're on desktop you can hold ctrl and make multiple language selections. I have undetermined and English selected.
As to why this is even a thing that needs to be set I have no idea either.
The intent is to label content by language so that people can easily filter out languages they can't read. The presumption that English, say, is the default language because the big websites are all US based doesn't really hold in the Fediverse, where a lot of users, historically, were from Europe.
But the feature's just kind of... broken right now, though.
The Lemmy UI is terrible and as tagging isn't actually mandatory in Lemmy, most posts just fall under "undetermined".
Kbin has mandatory tagging - yay - but the list has maybe only like a dozen languages and I don't Kbin has the filtering implemented anyway. Though I have to say having Finnish as an option but no Swedish does make just a tiny bit happy.
Lemmy has svenska.
yeah, that's what i'm sayin
Just to point that this is the default and "obvious" behavior for lists since the 90's (or, rather the 80's if you count Unixes GUIs). Yet almost nobody knows it for some reason (probably because it's not obvious at all, but IDK).
Multiselect lists are outdated design, requiring prior knowledge of what they are and the use of keyboard (that you might not have if using a touchscreen device) for a simple interaction with a webpage is terrible UX. The issue is that it's how browsers render them by default, a 'proper' multiselect requires a bunch of css and javascript.
I couldn't figure out how to make selections at all.
I still don't know how to do this or understand exactly what this feature does
Agreed. I really didn’t know what effect it would have if I changed it, so I just selected all languages. 🤷♂️
i've also noticed that sometimes if you're trying to do a text only post, not choosing any language at all will allow it to post whereas selecting a language will cause it to just hang/spin forever.
I tried to deselect Undefined, but it stayed selected after I saved the changes.