I’m assuming that this means that if you select a language, you will only be shown posts of that specified language; therefore, if you choose an uncommon language, you will see very little content (I’m assuming the most common language that is used on Lemmy, currently, is English). The warning, on its own, is rather nebulous, to me.
Most people will not bother actually setting the language on their posts. To be fair, the UI for doing so is a little weird, and mostly, people tend to just type the title and content and be done with it.
If you deselect “unspecified” you’re now relying on most posts having a language tag. Because this is never going to be true, you’ll be missing out on a lot of content.
The warning is there to make sure you know you’ll be limiting your content for no reason.
If I am understanding correctly, that feels like a weird way to do things. I would think that posts that don’t have a language set would be visible no matter what language you set in the profile settings, and if you did set a language, it would exclude any post that does have a language set.
By default they’re visible. By deselecting “unspecified” you’re voluntarily making them invisible. The warning is precisely to point this out.
So, just to be explicit, selecting some language, x, will only show posts that are tagged with that language, thereby hiding all posts with tags for other languages, while also hiding posts with no language tag?
That depends on wether or not you keep “undefined” selected.
If you select English, and nothing else, and remove “Undefined” from your selection… Yes, you’re only going to be shown posts and comments explicitly tagged as English. If you keep “Undefined” you’ll see posts in English and posts where no language was set.
If you want to see posts tagged as “French” you also need to have “French” selected in your language list.
Wait… I can select multiple languages, simultaneously? How do I do this? I tried clicking multiple things in the language list, and it just moved the selection to that other language.
Yeah the UI is pretty bad at the moment. You can select multiple items by holding the Shift key and clicking them. I don’t know how to do it from mobile.