Mastodon's language filtering for posts doesn't work (at least on mastodon.social).

[tamsynulthara@mastodon.social]

Mastodon's language filtering for posts doesn't work (at least on mastodon.social). I end up having to mute anyone posting in anything other than English to keep my timeline readable, which is far from ideal when they might be posting in both English and another language.

[squads@mas.to]

@iwein , how did you fix this?
@TamsynUlthara needs assistance
@FediTips ,
#Mastodonfilter
#feditips

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

@squads @iwein @TamsynUlthara

The filter depends on people choosing their posting language correctly. If they write in one language but chose another language, it messes up the filters.

There's more info on how to set it at https://fedi.tips/setting-your-language-preferences-on-mastodon-and-filtering-out-posts-in-other-languages

If someone uses multiple languages, they can set it on a per-post basis using the options at the bottom of the window when they're writing the post.

[tamsynulthara@mastodon.social]

@FediTips @squads @iwein Depending on the poster to select what language the post is in means it's pretty much useless from the get-go. There really should be language detection involved; trigrams make this easy.

[livinthelookingglass@tech.lgbt]

@TamsynUlthara
@FediTips @squads @iwein
I also have been quite frustrated by this

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

@LivInTheLookingGlass @TamsynUlthara @squads @iwein

There used to be an automatic detection system many years ago, but it apparently wasn't reliable enough due to the often very short length of posts in microblogging. This made it hide posts when it shouldn't, or showed posts when it shouldn't, so it was changed to a manual system.

However, there is an open issue on the Mastodon Github about bringing back automatic detection:

Re-introduce automatic language detection for posts · Issue #25568 · mastodon/mastodon

Pitch Many users (even bots!) don't correctly set the language tag when posting. This can result in timelines containing very frequent unreadable posts for users not speaking the language, which is inconvenient. I imagine it may cause ev...

GitHub (github.com)

[tamsynulthara@mastodon.social]

@FediTips @LivInTheLookingGlass @squads @iwein Oooh, I'm going to chime in on that. An opt-in automatic detection would hugely help my sanity. Thank you!

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

@TamsynUlthara

Giving people the option of using autodetection anyway (knowing it may not work 100%) sounds like a sensible idea