You know what my real actual beef with Mastodon is? How much emphasis it places on language. Sooooo many instances force you to speak exclusively, or mostly, one language.
Personally I’m not bothered at all by seeing a language I don’t understand on my feed.
And to put it in context, 60% of the world is at least bilingual; most monolingual places are colonizing or colonizer-majority countries.
Like I’m not trying to be inflammatory, but an authority enforcing one language, and penalizing folks when they speak another, is what my grandparents experienced in school during colonization.
@being thank you for pointing this out!
i do think from a moderation perspective it’s helpful to have your users mostly speaking languages the mod team speaks — eg, if you receive a moderation report for a sexist post and its in a language you don’t speak what are you supposed to do? rely on google translate & hope it captures all the nuances? try to track down someone who *does* speak the language & reveal potentially sensitive info to them?
but the solution should be to build multi-lingual mod teams who can handle those sorts of situations, not to have an all-english fediverse
@Satsuma yesss I totally agree with this!
I don’t have experience being a mod yet, so I might be totally dunning-krugering. But I do suspect that FOMO and the feeling of loss of control might play a part, because logistically I think there’s a range of possibilities other than “English only on my gardening-themed instance, if you want to speak Spanish go make your own gardening instance that we will not federate with”
Planning on making a shared instance soon tho, let’s see if I eat my words!