@jean I am one of those mixing English and German posts. Hi @manuel 👋 Maybe we should figure out a way to gather the German speaking users? Might make it easier for others to join if they see they aren’t alone.

@holgerfrohloff We’ve thought about a flag emoji tag to support discovery. There are definitely some pockets of non-English conversation going on. From where I sit, I see 🇵🇹, 🇳🇴, 🇸🇪, 🇩🇪, and 🇫🇷 most frequently. Not so much Spanish interestingly. For my part, I run non-English posts through Google Translate, and if they are not spam or in violation of other community guidelines, I usually add them to the main Discover timeline.

@jean 🇧🇷 Brazilian here!

@holgerfrohloff same here, mixing English and Brazilian Portuguese. I will probably stick to a single language but still thinking about it.

@mdalves I was going to add the Brazil flag too. I know there are a few of you. I hesitated because I didn’t want to raise the ire of Team Portugal, in case they accused me of not knowing there is a difference between the two Portugueses. You do not want to cross that @maique guy!

@mdalves I tried sticking to one but that feels so limiting. I decided that I wouldn't limit myself in real life from talking in English with English-speaking people. So why should I do that online? So it's simply both, depending on the context and my mood. And as @jean said, it's pretty easy to translate the non-English texts, so…

@jean Interesting! Would the emoji flag tag happen automatically, or is this something a user would have to add to their posts?

@holgerfrohloff oh, I hadn’t thought of automating it! I’ll check into it.

@jean Awesome. This is one thing I really like about Micro.blog: The opportunity to talk to the people running and creating it. It's always magical when you can do that and maybe in a tiny way help make things better for everybody.

@jean With the two flags you’d be covering all (or most) bases. But I hear that maique guy isn’t one to get angry 🥰

@jean The flag thing bothers me a bit and instead I'd like to suggest lists like those you have for cyclists or pen enthusiasts etc. Folks could enrol themselves and the lists could be mentioned and made more prominent somewhere. Why not flags? Languages don't stick within country borders — what flag for Spanish — Spain or Mexico (for example)? What about languages spoken in China? Would the Spanish flag be for folks blogging in Basque? What about a flag for English (we English speakers need a flag as we shouldn't be the default language) — American flag? UK? England? Australia? You already mentioned the Portuguese flag question.

@Miraz thank you for your thoughts and insight. I haven’t considered that and you made me aware. Thanks!

@mdalves @jean another Brazilian 🇧🇷 here, and I must say I’d love to have a way to discover posts written in other languages. I love languages and speak a bit of French and Spanish besides English, and (for obvious reasons) Portuguese.

Maybe in the future, also, MB could release a feature to help us localize our posts, specially for long form posts. This would help us write the same content and reach more users out there, within and outside mb :)

@Miraz Excellent point. I want to look into @holgerfrohloff’s suggestion that we automate it. Then no emoji is needed!

@holgerfrohoff @mdalves @geofftaylor @maique @Miraz @danielsantos This is what I love about Micro.blog. People are interested in how to make this better for individuals. I need to spend some time with @manton figuring out how to best do this.

I wonder if the original poster and new microblogger @manuel will see this thread! Look what he started, without even knowing it.

@Miraz @jean I know there are fights all the time between Duolingo users about what flags Duolingo chooses to use for its courses. Lots of "Why are the American and Brazilian flags used for English and Portuguese??" "Those are the most-spoken dialects" "OK, so why is the Spanish flag used for Spanish when the Mexican dialect is more spoken??" "Because the Mexican flag isn't distinctive enough" "What did you say about the Mexican flag????" For Arabic, at least they can use the Arab League flag. And that's without getting into the very valid question of what flags should be used for minority languages, of course. I know some can be associated with regional flags (like the senyera for Catalan, the ikurriña for Basque, and there is a Kurdish flag...) but not all, and they don't have emoji support. Language codes might be a bit boring-looking compared to flags, but at least they're less controversial 😊

@jayeless @jean I should have thought of language codes… 🤦🏽‍♀️