Default Content Languages to None

[SpriterGors]

Describe the Feature

With the sudden increase of users from all over the globe, I believe that the default setting for "Content Languages" should be "None". This will allow users to see posts in any language.

I believe it is set to your app language settings at first, in a way to filter content according to what languages you can understand, but I think this is applied overzealously because:

1. It limits the reach of art made by foreign artists;
2. Makes the feed seem smaller than it actually is;
3. Because of the issue mentioned in #5764 , posts made in Language A may be set as B by accident, and this would impact negatively on the filtering anyway.

This is purely my personal thought on the matter but a social media site will feel more alive if you can see everyone posting there regardless of language settings. The user can then limit it if they so please.

I too had problems with this feature, thinking my custom feeds were broken (turns out they were being limited by the "Content Language" feature. I've disabled it and now it works as intended, though I do not remember formally toggling languages there.

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Describe Alternatives

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Additional Context

Highlighted by this post and subsequent replies: https://bsky.app/profile/galileogb.bsky.social/post/3l6qihdz3ln2v

[SpriterGors]

As of October 25, it seems that this has been solved, according to the Google Play update for Bluesky:

Reworked the search page to default to all languages and always show the language selector

So I think this has been solved, can someone confirm?

[Gudine]

I believe that's in response to this post (among others) and it only applies to the search functionality.

[Pandoskowy]

Something is probably wrong. After reinstalling the app, I have only one language selected in the settings, yet I see posts in all languages. I think the author's idea was to display posts in all languages by default, instead of automatically only in the language of the operating system, but now the language selection in the settings is ignored at all. I guess it's a bug now. Build version: 1.92.1.355; android

[Gudine]

It's still working for me, though not on the Following feed for some reason.

If you're having the issue elsewhere, then it's worth noting that:

• Posts' language can be mistagged
• If a feed doesn't have any posts within the language filter, the filter is ignored

On another note, I just realized OP's issue is a duplicate of #3634.

[SpriterGors]

Thanks @Gudine for the heads up, indeed it seems to be the case.

This "feature" gave me a lot of headaches because none of my feeds would work and I remember having to send several emails to the staff thinking something was broken. Turns out it was the language filter being activated to English (something that I do not remember going manually). This effectively wiped out all my brazilian friends' posts from the feeds, which is extremely upsetting.

[Tamschi]

It's still working for me, though not on the Following feed for some reason.

The "Following" feed is explicitly exempt from the filter.

On another note, I just realized OP's issue is a duplicate of https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/3634.

Not quite I think.

I looked at the repository of a Japanese user using TOKIMEKI before and the posts in there usually had two or three language tags, often mismatched. It seems that TOKIMEKI tries to auto-detect the language setting per post by default, which massively reduces the reliability.

Bluesky only suggests to manually switch the language setting when authoring a post if it has high confidence it's different from the current one, which makes it largely reliable for posts authored on e.g. bsky.app. (There seems to be some length threshold, too.)

That said, the way Bluesky reacts to posts tagged with multiple languages (selecting the single "most likely" one from among the tags, then using only that to filter) exacerbates the problem with clients that perform unreliable or no language tagging.