Mastodon: Allow date format to be selected in English translation

[serin-delaunay]

The English translation uses short dates in the m/d format in timelines since https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/5171. For ambiguous dates (such as 1/11, the 11th of January) this is quite confusing for English speakers who are used to d/m format. The only way I can find to change this at the moment is to switch to a completely different language.

Could English dialects have separate translations, could a separate date format option be added, or could the the browser's locale be conditionally used, to allow non-US English-language users some flexibility?

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• [x] I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.
• [ ] This bug happens on a tagged release and not on master (If you're a user, don't worry about this).

[mjog]

Coming from a normal country, dates like "10/20" look like random fractional numbers or post/repost counts or something.

[Hasimir]

Most software gets around this by using a system's locale configuration and then falling back to either an international (e.g. ISO standard) or US default if that can't be determined (e.g. some Windows or some older systems).

The related problem is this US-centric m/d only display without even the option of a year means that some very old statuses are being seen, possibly without context when people resurrect old accounts. Here's a very recent example:

Due to the recent closing of one instance in a rather dramatic manner, a lot of people reactivated older accounts on larger instances. I won't name the instance: if you reading this at the same time as the event, you already know; if you're reading in the future then it doesn't matter. When that happened other users would see their streams with dates like "4/1" or "4/2" and, even adjusting for American-centric displays, still thought that meant the Easter weekend just gone, not 53 weeks ago.

This is ... less than ideal. It's also not a new problem in software and one that has been solved at the operating system level (sometimes with TZ patches), Mastodon should really take advantage of that by honouring the locale settings.

Edit: This article has multiple JS solutions to this problem and moment.js might work with React, but I'm not certain.

[ThibG]

While this doesn't exactly address this issue, the short date format has been changed (see #7233).

[jkmyklebust]

As a user, I would have liked the option to define date format in my settings.