Problem: Add language dropdown to compose in web UI

[jorgesat]

Adding a language dropdown menu to the compose block so that toots are classified by language.

Proposed solution:

Merge the following Mastodon PR:
mastodon/mastodon#18420

[weex]

Thanks for the issue. This is a great opportunity to restate as a problem! I understand Mastodon added a dropdown that allows the user to select from a ton of languages when they're composing a toot. What I wonder is what problem is that attempting to address?

If the problem is "I can't specify a language at compose time", I could imaging being bilingual and wanting a toggle or, if I know more languages, wanting to just a few to show in the dropdown. Maybe that PR is what gets submitted here but there are hopefully many solutions to the problem.

[jorgesat]

I understand. I think it is indeed an issue for bilingual or multilingual users, which is a common case in our instance. Classifying toots by language is useful for readers who are filtering timelines by language. Although, I am not sure if mastodon is already applying such filters already without the need of user input.

[weex]

I haven't looked at individual posts to inspect language metadata but a small sample of the last hour shows that filtering of the federated timeline works, based at least with English checked on /settings/preferences/other. I don't know if the ones that were filtered were manually or automatically classified. I'll try to look more into how this works.

[politas]

Can I suggest that the problem should be:

Cannot specify language on an individual post. Currently, in order to post in a specified different language , a user must change their default posting language to a specific language instead of the default 'detect language' setting, and then change again for each different language.
Users should be able to easily override the default language for a post.
Users should be able to mark the languages they wish to post in so as not to have a huge list every time they want to specify a language.