Language-specific social media accounts?

[Changaco]

https://unixcorn.xyz/@porkhaus/99171978050835354

Should we have separate Mastodon accounts for English and French?

What about Twitter and Diaspora*?

cc @liberapay/media-managers

[jorgesumle]

I see nothing wrong about using just one account. The problem is that social networks don't support post translation. I think that Mastodon can filter by language https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/1772, so maybe we should add that feature to Diaspora* too.

The problem with language-specific accounts is that when German-, Esperanto-... French-speakers are gone, what should we do with that inactive account?

[aggsol]

Mastodon already allows to filter for language. If users only speak English the French toots will be filtered.

[MayeulC]

The idea behind multiple accounts is to avoid:

• Showing posts to someone in a language they don't understand
• Showing duplicate posts to people who understand both

And to allow people to follow only one language, in order to solve those issues.

Of course, writing two posts on the same account or on different accounts will in both cases split the answers, possibly removing some of the bilingual community from potential discussions.

After thinking a bit more about it, the ideal would be multilingual posts (either translated by the user or by the community). I don't think any platform supports this at the moment, but open platforms could be improved...

[Changaco]

Other than Liberapay the only webapp I know of which supports multi-lingual messages is Facebook.

[mattbk]

The problem is that social networks don't support post translation.

Mastodon and Tweetdeck can both translate posts, but I don't see native Twitter translation.

[Changaco]

Related question from @trebmuh in https://github.com/liberapay/salon/issues/183#issuecomment-352207582:

By the way, I saw that the Diaspora* account biography is only in English. I'd recommend to add a French bio as well since we're posting in French as well (consistency) and since the French and francophone community looks to be a big part of what Liberapay is so far. Shouldn't we?

[Changaco]

https://mastodon.social/@Niquarl/99748199411530973

@Liberapay je voudrais pas être méchant mais si vous avez l'intention de toot en plusieurs langue peut-être que vous devriez créé différent compte.

DeepL translation:

I wouldn't want to be mean but if you intend to toot in several languages maybe you should create different account.

[Changaco]

https://mastodon.technology/@dbrgn/99749449057550305

wouldn't it be better to have separate accounts for english/french/spanish communication? 🙂

[dbrgn]

Thanks for posting this, @Changaco :)

I wasn't aware of any translation feature. But in any case, I speach English, German, Spanish and some French. I want to be able to follow accounts that communicate in those languages without any of them being filtered out, but at the same time I don't want to read the same message three times in my timeline :slightly_smiling_face:

I think multiple accounts would be best, then every user can choose what language to follow.

[Niquarl]

Thanks for posting my toot yo ^^ I guess I should have checked the issues before tooting.

For me, it's the same as for @dbrgn. It's not that big of an issue however and I clearly understand why it wouldn't be fixed. Perhaps it's even better this way as others have pointed out.

[Changaco]

I've opened an issue upstream: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/6920.

[Changaco]

https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99751124600550302

Some of you have suggested that we should create separate Mastodon accounts for the different languages we toot in (currently: English, French, and Spanish). We may end up doing just that, however we think it would be great if the multilingual support of Mastodon could be extended instead, so we've submitted a proposal: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/6920

[trebmuh]

In French : https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99751255368634883

[jorgesumle]

In Spanish: https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99751316396163668

[Changaco]

I've just realized that @aggsol's comment above (https://github.com/liberapay/salon/issues/186#issuecomment-351718398) is incorrect. Mastodon only filters languages in public timelines, not the personal ("Home") timeline, so our followers can't avoid our translated toots by modifying their preferences.

[jorgesumle]

Mastodon only filters languages in public timelines, not the personal ("Home") timeline, so our followers can't avoid our translated toots by modifying their preferences.

As some users have complained about the same information in different languages and currently there is no way to avoid redundancy, I'm going to stop posting news in Spanish there until this issue is fixed by Mastodon.

[Changaco]

I think it's unlikely that Mastodon's multilingualism will be improved in the near future.

We need a bot that automatically boosts toots from our main multilingual account into the corresponding language-specific accounts. Mastodon already detects the language of a toot so the bot doesn't even have to do that.

[dbrgn]

We need a bot that automatically boosts toots from our main multilingual account into the corresponding language-specific accounts.

Isn't that a bit overengineered? :)

[Changaco]

It's a simple automated solution that other multilingual teams could benefit from, and which could be extended to support Twitter and Diaspora* as well.

[trebmuh]

Related question from @trebmuh in #183 (comment):

By the way, I saw that the Diaspora* account biography is only in English. I'd recommend to add a French bio as well since we're posting in French as well (consistency) and since the French and francophone community looks to be a big part of what Liberapay is so far. Shouldn't we?

While I was connected to the diaspora* account to publish a summary post on it, I've enjoyed to be there to add a French summary on the profile too. There is still some space for another language if someone is starting to publish translations post on Diaspora* in such a language.