洪民憙 (Hong Minhee): @cheeaun That ruby annotation approach is interesting! It's a creative solution for inline translations. I agree though—it's frustrating that despite ActivityPub having built-in support for multilingual content through contentMap, major implementations like Mastodon don't properly display this content. If they did, we wouldn't need these workarounds. The language filtering feature in Mastodon profiles that you mentioned is useful, but it only works well with separate posts. It's a trade-off between user experience (reading only preferred languages) and maintaining content relationship (keeping translations connected). I'm thinking of implementing multiple approaches to give our users flexibility while we wait for better contentMap support across the fediverse. The ideal solution would be for more ActivityPub servers to properly implement the multilingual features already in the spec!

Hackers’ Pub

Syntax	Description	Examples
`"` keyword `"`	Finds the string within quotes, including spaces. Case-insensitive. (Escape quotes inside with `\"`)	`"Hackers' Pub"`
`from:` handle	Finds content written by the specified user.	`from:hongminhee` `from:hongminhee@hollo.social`
`lang:` ISO 639-1	Finds content written in the specified language.	`lang:en`
`#` tag	Finds content with the specified tag. Case-insensitive.	`#HackersPub`
condition condition	Finds content that satisfies both conditions on either side of the space (logical AND).	`"Hackers' Pub" lang:en`
condition `OR` condition	Finds content that satisfies at least one of the conditions on either side of the OR operator (logical OR).	`#HackersPub OR "Hackers' Pub" lang:en`
`(` condition `)`	Combines the operators within the parentheses first.	`(#HackersPub OR "Hackers' Pub" OR "Hackers Pub") lang:en`

Chee Aun 🤔 @cheeaun@mastodon.social

4/17/2025, 4:22:28 AM

Public

@hongminhee洪民憙 (Hong Minhee) (4) seems good. It'll be no different than having mixed-language content. E.g. the ruby tags can be extended as such:

```
<ruby lang="ja">日本語<rp>(</rp><rt lang="ko">일본어</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>
```

But, I think some folks might want to separate them with (1), so that people can subscribe to one account but filter by language ("Change subscribed language" in individual profile pages on Mastodon).

洪民憙 (Hong Minhee) @hongminhee@hackers.pub

4/17/2025, 4:35:43 AM

Public

@cheeaunChee Aun 🤔 That ruby annotation approach is interesting! It's a creative solution for inline translations.

I agree though—it's frustrating that despite ActivityPub having built-in support for multilingual content through contentMap, major implementations like Mastodon don't properly display this content. If they did, we wouldn't need these workarounds.

The language filtering feature in Mastodon profiles that you mentioned is useful, but it only works well with separate posts. It's a trade-off between user experience (reading only preferred languages) and maintaining content relationship (keeping translations connected).

I'm thinking of implementing multiple approaches to give our users flexibility while we wait for better contentMap support across the fediverse. The ideal solution would be for more ActivityPub servers to properly implement the multilingual features already in the spec!

If you have a fediverse account, you can reply to this note from your own instance. Search https://hackers.pub/ap/notes/01964208-04f9-7c7f-b904-0d4a54b019f5 on your instance and reply to it.