[Ask Europe] People speaking languages with a small population on Lemmy, how do you deal with the dilemma of posting in English or in your other language? (jlai.lu)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by Servais@jlai.lu to c/yurop@lemm.ee

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Basically, that's it.

I'm a French speaker, so I try to participate mainly on the French speaking communities such as !forumlibre@jlai.lu, !rance@jlai.lu, !cineseries@jlai.lu, but the issue is that apart from the 2-3 top ones, the others are usually very quiet.

I know it's a chicken and egg problem (as you need content for people to come and participate), but for instance with movies, I'm always torn between posting the content in the French-speaking community, or the much larger !movies@lemm.ee, where I know that the audience is much bigger. Same for science, history, most topics actually.

I don't expect anyone to have a magical formula (the most obvious solution being just having more speakers of that language on Lemmy), but I was curious to see if other people in the same situation had insights to share.

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[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 3 points 9 months ago

Bonjour. I was native english but like to read in french, however for me it’s slower to write, so I'm less likely to reply. I think we should assume more tolerance of mixed languages within discussions, that way we would see how much diversity is out there.
Actually most kids in the world - not just in Europe - grow up multilingual - , as in most of India, Africa etc. there are different local and national languages, and often mixed parents. The anglosphere is the exception, not the rule. I think the biggest challenge for the fediverse is to break out beyond Europe + North-america (+Japan - but that community is also a separate bubble), to do that we have to solve this issue.
By the way it helps to select 'scaled' as default algorithm, to see more of the smaller communities. But it would be nice to be able to blend discussion from communities from different instances relating to same (or similar) news item.

[-] Servais@jlai.lu 3 points 9 months ago

Merci pour ton message, très intéressant!

You indeed have a point about multilingual being the norm on other continents. Hopefully that is slowly going to change with the newer generations more exposed to other languages.