Mastodon: Allow users to post multiple versions of their toots in different languages

[ealgase]

Pitch

Allow users to submit multiple language versions of statuses (via the API, and implemented in the main client). They'd be submitted as status_en and spoiler_text_en, status_fr and spoiler_text_fr, etc. The current status and spoiler_text's language would be set to the language that the user has chosen as their default in settings.

Motivation

There are many users (especially software developers and instance admins) who have followers in many languages (e.g. English and French). Many post many separate toots in each language to convey the same message. If they could instead specify an English, French, etc version, it would be much more user friendly and accessible.

[noellabo]

I was thinking about the same thing.
I want to send my post to a user who can read Japanese and a user who can read English simultaneously with the same post ID.
If you have different posts, Fediverse will be divided by the language.
This is actually the case now, and there is a division between Japanese Fediverse and multilingual Fediverse.

For the implementation,

WebUI: To be able to select the language when posting
WebUI: Make it possible to add post in second language optionally (or 3 or more)
API: POST /api/v1/statuses language specification and more ways to post additional content
DB: devise a way to store additional content
ActivityPub: multilingual support (e.g. contentMap) for non-compliant properties
(see. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/#naturalLanguageValues )

[rugk]

However, please always let the user manually switch the languages of the toot. Because otherwise, this feature can be abused for nefarious purposes:

• You as a user can then write a fully legitimate and popular entry in one language (that is wildly shared e.g.), while you write something totally different, hateful/rude/… in another language.

[noellabo]

It was pointed out that having multiple aspects could hide malicious intent.

Thus, in implementations that can not handle multiple languages, content should contain the combined content of all languages.

Also, implementations that can handle multiple languages ​​should always be able to switch languages.

Such malicious postings should be prohibited in advance by the server operation policy as user fraud. If moderators or users who understand both languages ​​can notice this, they can report based on the policy.

Activity may be expressed like this.

"content": "<p lang=ja>遠い昔、はるかかなたの銀河系で....</p><p lang=en>A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....</p>",
"contentMap": {
  "ja": "<p>遠い昔、はるかかなたの銀河系で....</p>",
  "en": "<p>A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....</p>"
}

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[trwnh]

as a multilingual user i would still like to see this