Wow, half of the federated timeline is non-English now. That's pretty cool; now a translate feature would be really helpful.
@zack only half? Mine is about 60% Japanese 20% French, 10% Swedish and 10% English.
@zack Totally agree
@zack One interesting thing is that that means at least someone here is following those people… probably not surprisingly that we have Japanese, French, Swedish, etc. speakers by now. 😊
The other thing I'd say is that the Federated Timeline really starts to become less useful the more people you find to follow and the more an instance grows. E.g. on mastodon.social I just hang out on Home; I never look at the timeline.
OTOH yes a translate feature would be great. 😁
@nolan Yeah on .social, I can't use the federated timeline anymore.
I think the federated timeline is more of a tool to kickstart an instance and its users. On a small instance, it helps to find people you wouldn't have otherwise found. It's like users on your instance recommending people to follow without manually recommending. But once an instance gets too big, the federated timeline starts moving too fast to be usable. But by that point, your local timeline should be a really good feed.
@zack Some of us devs are looking into introducing a PR for auto-translation using Google Translate's APIs.
@zack I've been enjoying looking at the different languages very much. I would welcome a facility to translate, but it's also a lovely challenge being forced to decode without the facility!