I keep getting an error about selecting a language in my Lemmy.World account. I have English and Undetermined selected but when posting from Voyager, I still get the same error.

Edit: seems to be comments only; I was able to create this post.

  • @dingusEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    This doesn’t seem to be a Voyager specific issue. I have run into it on other mobile apps.

    Lemmy has this feature where, in addition to setting a default language in your profile, you can also specify what language each comment you make is in (ex: if you’re bilingual and you make some comments in German and some comments in English, you can specify which is which when commenting).

    For whatever reason, sometimes Lemmy does NOT let you set a default comment language. You can pick which languages you view in your settings, but this doesn’t seem to translate over to a default comment language.

    Most of the time when posting, people don’t select a comment language. It is left as undefined. But for whatever reason, sometimes Lemmy decides that it will NOT let you proceed without picking a comment language. None of the mobile apps seem to let you pick a language for an individual comment, which will mean that you cannot post when this occurs.

    I do NOT know why Lemmy will decide to force you to pick a comment language sometimes and other times it will not. But it seems like it is a Lemmy-side error.

    I was having trouble commenting in this thread here as an example in both Voyager and Jerboa: https://lemmy.world/post/1708844

    While Voyager can’t fix this behavior from Lemmy, perhaps a feature could be added that allows us to choose a language for individual comments.

    • @GhostlyPixelEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      I believe it happens if the OP sets the language to something other than undefined when creating their post. It is an option I noticed when using lemmy.world directly, I set it to English on a post I made, someone PM’d me and said they couldn’t leave a comment, I changed the post’s language to undefined via an edit, and then the person was able to comment on it. I was able to recreate the issue on my end with both an app and also with the lemmy.world browser UI with language set to undefined.

      I think being able to mark certain posts as certain languages has its advantages, but when most lemmy front ends don’t support language settings, it just causes silent errors and confusion.