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.

  • crimeschneck@feddit.nlEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    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.

    Thank you for this information! I thought you can only select one language in your personal settings and thats why I haven’t selected any language at all until now, but selecting multiple ones works the same way as you described it for the community settings. Maybe this should be clarified on the settings page.

  • Xylight@lemdro.idEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    I don’t think I intended for photon to require a language to be selected. If it’s left unselected, does it use your profile default? If so, I made a bug.

    • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      It selects Undetermined by default and there is no way to change default in Photon settings or profile settings. The only way to change the language is on per post basis.

      Version 1.31.2

  • Xylight@lemdro.idEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    Hey, I recently updated photon (v1.31.3) and unintentionally fixed this issue (mostly). It’ll now default to undefined language, so it’ll use the community default when posting. You’ll need to click “set language” if you want to explicitly set one.

  • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Actually, if a users doesn’t select a language, the client is supposed to submit the post without any language selected (not even undetermined). THE SERVER then defaults the post to one of the languages allowed in the community.

    This is probably how Photon has worked until now, since it obviously never got an error no matter where you posted, even though it didn’t have a language selector at all.

    But since photon now has a language selector, it is now defaulting to making posts with “undetermined” unless the user changes it, instead of null. If it was using an actual null value then the posts would be correctly defaulting to something valid for the community.

    Source: Thunder ran into the same issue when language selection was added to posting and commenting.

    @Xylight@lemdro.id might want to experiment with that a bit.

    • Xylight@lemdro.idEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      I recently changed how language selection works, it’ll default to undefined then when you click “set language” then it will actually select a language

      • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Great! Is that in a recent release? I haven’t updated my photon instance in a bit.

        Love your work btw, it’s so nice to have a great UI with multi-account support for browsing/posting/modding at my desktop.

        • Xylight@lemdro.idEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          Yeah, it’s recent with a slightly changed design for the post page. (v1.31.3)

  • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

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

    This was done to have proper tagging of the language used.

    Lemmy UI will automatically match the community language with yours to find a match, English in this case. I never have to select English when posting here

    I would rather have the front ends have a default language than allow Undetermined for the community but we can of course discuss

    • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      1·
      2 months 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.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
        1·
        2 months 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

        • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
          1·
          2 months 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.

          • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
            1·
            2 months 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?

            • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
              2·
              2 months 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.