I find myself blocking a lot of foreign communities just because they're foreign. It feels wrong and unnecessary. This is the future isn't it?
If I set my settings to English why can't I just use Lemmy in English and never know that the person I'm chatting to is doing so in German and they never know that I'm doing so in English?
Kbin and Lemmy etc should simply allow options for preferred languages, and people can select whatever they prefer. Giving them the option to not see posts or see translated posts should work out fine. I bet this problem get resolved eventually. In the meantime, I'm not too bothered by blocking magazines/communities that are non-english. No biggie.
In Lemmy, you can choose your languages under Settings -> Languages. The main problem is that Lemmy currently doesn't have any mechanism to automatically determine a post's language and instead relies on users to set the language for each post and comment. Therefore most content is marked as "Undetermined".
Seems like submitting a post should require setting a language for it :/ No need to "determine" the language when the submitter can simply note what it is. The default for the field could even be their set profile language to make it easier.
This is already supported in kbin! Press your icon in the top right corner and enter the settings, and select the languages you're interested in under the "Filter languages of threads and posts" setting (somewhat counter-intuitively under the "Appearance" heading). Seems to be working great for me at least :)