Auto-translation and view diversity

What I’m missing most from Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn AND X now is auto-translation. Manual translation doesn’t work well in a scrolling feed, because users are less likely to pause on foreign language posts to manually translate them. (This is one of the few things Facebook now leads on 😵)

Of course, if those latter closed networks had open access, I could choose a software client which would do this for me 🙄 This is one reason I’m hoping the EU’s Digital Markets Act will be extended to require the largest social networking services to be interoperable.

And yes, this would be more resource-intensive than manual translation. But you could use OS support where available (like iOS) and have the translator and/or protocol support auto-sharing of translations, amortising the cost across the entire network.

And this isn’t just a nice-to-have. I’d hope it would lead to a significant increase in diversity of people’s feeds and perspectives. This would be especially valuable in a multilingual polity like the EU (it could even play a small part in supporting the emergence of an EU demos.)