It makes sense to not use English if the target audience is known to not speak it, but it is often not the case.
English is the most commonly spoken language in the world, after all. To not use it, is to make the content less searchable and harder to understand for billions of people.
Over a billion of those people have learned it as their second language simply to understand and be understood by each other. Is it really that weird that those who can’t be bothered to do the same get downvoted?
Except not everyone has learned english, not everyone can especially older people.
Lemmy has that feature built-in that communities can support arbitrary languages. If you don’t want to see them you can literally just pick your languages in your profile, and it’ll automatically ignore what you can’t read.
A bit weird in practice, but it’s intended from the start to be available in everyone’s languages without having to make news-de, news-fr, news-es communities or have to rely on regional instances.
If we went with maximizing who can read your post then it should be in Chinese. The assumption that english is the default language for everything is very american.
What about “if the target audience is known to not speak it” part do you not understand?
It’s one thing to have your little community in whatever language and post there.
It’s another to show up in a very much international community and start posting in whatever random language you want. Or, worse, start replying to comments written in English using your language. Like this guy. Just… How do you even do that? Aren’t you supposed to kind of speak English to even understand the content of a comment you’re replying to? Why not respond using it, then?
I’m not a native English speaker. My friends aren’t either. Yet we all use it for pretty much the same reason. And if you think you can just chime in, go “你的母亲是只仓鼠,你父亲满身接骨木的气味”, and be both perfectly understood and not downvoted, you’re either a troll or an idiot.
On social networks for a long time, with excellent translators available, I don’t really care what language a post is written in. In this way I have found a lot of information, new things and very interesting contributions, which I would have missed by using filters.
If the inbuid translator in your browser isn’t enough, these are anyway better (both FOSS). Maybe the best ones you can find. both multi-engine, full customizable. Translate full page, selection, words, inverse translation, more than 120 lenguages.
Probably the are navegatin in new and as soon as they see non-english they downvote. These people doesn’t even have a single post in other than english,
You vastly underestimate the idiocy and childishness of Americans. I’ve seen people comment things like “use English, this is a US website”, “go to another site for your own country if you want to use anything other than English”, etc. even though the posts were in communities/subs specific for the language the post was in.
This has always been a thing online.
Many Americans are so dumb they think they are the vast majority on any website, and everything should be via their rules and ways. And there are several other things that seemingly only Americans are dumb enough to do and/or to not understand, things like timezones (even though they have several within their country), that the vast majority of the world uses Metric, that not every country has the same products or services, that their subjective experience of anything is in fact subjective, etc. I could go on for several more paragraphs with things like this.
Fact: the US uses the metric system for decades (maybe closer to a century?). All federal contracts in the US must be in metric. Its not the same at the State level, and its not mandated for private businesses–unless they’re working for the federal government.
Also every US American is taught metric in schools.
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