There are people in The Fediverse ⁂ who set the post's language correctly. Some people. As we set post's visibility (public, unlisted,etc) we can also set post's language clicking in the language toggle below input text area.
In Mastodon's settings we can set our default language for new posts, clicking in the language indicator we can change it for single posts.
These tools are useful depending on the software (client and servers) we are using. That's a flaw in decentralized and free software (as corporate software always remembers us 😄): adoption of common features, as it happens with reactions feature we have in Pleroma/Akkoma/Misskey
So we can take advantage in two levels
you can set in your account preferences to filter what languages you want to be shown in your timelines, so only posts written in those languages will be shown in your timelines if their language value is correctly set.
Preferences > Other > Language Filter, you mark what languages you want and the others will be filtered out.
Useful if you want a Federated Timeline with less clutter.
If some account you are following publishes using several languages but only one of them interests you (or understand) then you can set a filter for that account to select the languages you are interested in¹
Go to Mastodon's web interface², click on the @username to see they profile.
On the right side we have the bell to set personal notifications and the three dots menu icon ⋮ with more options, one of them is Modify subscribed languages³
Here we have a list with the languages that account has used in the past. It might be that the user is actually using several languages but if they has not set the language tag then that language will be not listed here.
Select here the languages you are interested in
The adoption of this practice is very low, even lower than Alt-Text descriptions, but I think it's worth writting about it here anyway.
¹ if the user has set this tag, as I've said at the top of this article
² other clients let users set this setting too, but it's recommended to use web interface.
³ only available if we are currently following that account.
⁴ this article was NOT translated using any AI or LLM tool, all errors are mine.
web de ghose (xmgz)