Basically, that’s it.

I’m a French speaker, so I try to participate mainly on the French speaking communities such as !forumlibre@jlai.lu, !rance@jlai.lu, !cineseries@jlai.lu, but the issue is that apart from the 2-3 top ones, the others are usually very quiet.

I know it’s a chicken and egg problem (as you need content for people to come and participate), but for instance with movies, I’m always torn between posting the content in the French-speaking community, or the much larger !movies@lemm.ee, where I know that the audience is much bigger. Same for science, history, most topics actually.

I don’t expect anyone to have a magical formula (the most obvious solution being just having more speakers of that language on Lemmy), but I was curious to see if other people in the same situation had insights to share.

  • cali_ash
    131·
    9 months ago

    I always go with English when the topic allows it. Why limit yourself to people that speak a certain language when it’s irrelevant to the topic?

    • Servais@jlai.luOP
      6·
      9 months ago

      Because it just feels different to speak the language you speak at home? I’m working in English all day, I don’t mind using the language, but I also like to speak French, each of them feels different.

      • cali_ash
        32·
        9 months ago

        I guess I just don’t care about that.

        If the entire German language was abolished and replaced with English, I’d welcome it.

        • Servais@jlai.luOP
          2·
          9 months ago

          That’s very interesting. I’ll probably post another topic along those lines in the coming days, I expect people spaeking languages further from English (Slavic or Romance languages) would have different opinions than German and Dutch speakers.

    • liwott@nerdica.net
      31·
      9 months ago

      @cali_ash @Servais

      Why limit yourself to people that speak a certain language when it’s irrelevant to the topic?

      Speaking english is also limiting oneself to people that speak a given language.

      • cali_ash
        31·
        9 months ago

        Not in the same way since English is pretty much the lingua franca of the internet.

        • liwott@nerdica.net
          21·
          9 months ago

          True, but we are still excluding some people when we use it. By always writing in English one always excludes the same ones.

        • Servais@jlai.luOP
          1·
          9 months ago

          A few years ago, definitely.

          Today, with the widespread usage of the Internet to most of the population, I’m not so sure. There are link aggregators operating in other languages, such as https://www.meneame.net/ for Spanish for instance, and they are quite popular and active. As someone else mentioned, even languages like Czech (10 millions speakers) have active communities on Reddit.