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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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Ask Lemmy
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Pretty much. The issue with foreign languages is that they’re impossible for an admin to actually administer. Because the admin has no idea if the posts are breaking rules. For all you know, a foreign community could be focused on sharing recipes, or could be focused on sharing Neo Nazi dogwhistles. And you’d have no way of distinguishing between the two without basically learning a new language.
Emphasis mine. That's bullshit. You got at least three resources at hand:
Note that you should be already doing #2 and #3 even in a monolingual instance or community; failure to do either means failure as a mod or admin.
Besides the three resources that I mentioned, remember that dogwhistling Nazi are trying to promote an ideology. They're likely to beeline towards the majority language of the instance/comm, because they want to be heard. Posting a dogwhistle in a language that practically nobody speaks is pointless.
Putting more work on the admin running the server, that's a great solution for someone who doesn't have to do the extra work.
That's a fallacy known as "moving the goalposts", given that the original claim was about impossibility. I'll bite though.
Yes, there is an additional amount of overhead. However, I genuinely do not think that it is a lot, provided that the admins are smart. Automatic translation is built in browsers nowadays, and again, context.
I'll give you an example. Someone posts a picture of a cat doing something silly, then text in a language that you don't speak. Do you even need to bother translating it to know if it's OK? ...not really, right? You can simply wait until there's any sort of report against it.
And going through this amount of overhead yields a more diverse and active community. The whole point of building a community - be it an instance, a /c/, or even a non-Lemmy forum - is to service people with an online space to hang around.
Another thing that you guys are failing to consider is that the ability of the admins to recruit help scales up alongside the size of the community. Most content will be probably fine; rule-breaking content ends getting reported, unless the community itself is composed of nothing but troublemakers. The later is however blatantly obvious even if you don't speak the language.
Why I'm insisting on this point: people in Lemmy really, really love to babble about minorities and their empowerment. But when it comes to practical actions towards the empowerment of minorities, suddenly it's "too hard"?
This sort of "use this language else fuck off" approach might not be too problematic for something like a Spanish or a Mandarin speaker; sure, they'll eventually find some instance in their language. The picture however changes when you get someone who speaks Basque or Min or another minority language - because that instance won't exist.
I think that the function of translating posts and messages, as in Mastodon, would facilitate the moderation of foreign communities.
Right but it has to be automatic. It has to detect that the language isn't in whatever language I speak and then add a little link I can click to translate it. Like how YouTube comment works.
If I have to copy paste every single comment into Google translate it's just not worth the time and effort. Especially since they can almost certainly find an instance where the moderator does speak their language.
I'll reply to my own comment for transparency, to avoid editing the above after a bunch of users replied.
Nota bene: this is solely a taunt to provoke self-reflection.
How many of you are genuinely concerned about the feasibility of a multilingual instance, even in languages that the admins might not be speakers of? And how many of you are instead pissed, because the idea of multiple languages in the same instance would invade the online "Lebensraum" of your "Reichsprache"?
Or even, here's a third alternative: perhaps you're already unable to use context even in the languages that you speak, and you're unable to recruit community help even if this is essential in a monolingual/bubbled community, and so you can't see yourself relying on it. If that's the case, sorry to burst your bubble but you shouldn't be touching any position of power over what others may or may not say.
And as I mentioned in another comment, it's rather curious how people here love to babble about minorities and their empowerment, but when it comes to practical actions to support said empowerment, suddenly it's "too hard". Guess what, this "no foreign language in my online Reich!" approach hurts the most speakers of minority languages.
I think the point is that the mod of the instance doesn't want to be multilingual because of the unnecessary amount of overhead.
So your entire arguement doesn't make sense.
The claim is that "they’re impossible for an admin to actually administer". Not that there's an "unnecessary amount of overhead".
The argument makes sense in relation to what was said. It doesn't need to make sense in relation to your LLM-like hallucinations ("I think the point...").