Translation costs either money or user data. Probably a political issue.

Personally, I still can’t understand why Lemmy needs to deal with post and comment languages anyway. It’s a reasonable feature for microblogging. But when you start sorting content into groups (aka boards, communities, etc.), you don’t really need to mix different languages to discuss one specific topic.

Netnews and Bulletin Board Systems had language- and location-specific communities. Everyone participating in one of these communities/groups/boards was writing in the same language.

On my very first day on Lemmy, I couldn’t see the comments to most posts. Luckily I found an answer to this problem that was posted over 2 years ago: I forgot to select additional languages to just “Undetermined.”

I just skimmed over the texts on the settings page and assumed “undetermined” works like with other social media sites: if I don’t select anything, it shows me every language. And as communities are usually formed around a single language, it didn’t seem important. This isn’t the case with Lemmy. Undetermined is its own language, not a wildcard for all languages.

When users don’t know how multiselect works on desktop web, they probably end up with just one language selected and miss every post that has no language set.

It’s very strange.