Asklemmy

let them [toxic people] have some “containment cages” here and there

I think that worked well for the covid misinformation. And arguably quite some toxic (American) people left Twitter for gab.com and truthsocial.com

But... It has its downsides. I just had a conversation about right-wing populism in Germany. We - like many nations - currently suffer from that. I think filter bubbles are a big part of that dynamic. We discuss here, openly. While some other people radicalize themselves and each other on some Telegram channels. The far-right is on the rise everywhere and it starts to make me uncomfortable.

Regardless, we shouldn't give them a voice here. They're going to do it anyways, reasoning with them and giving good arguments does nothing and opposing them makes them even stronger. (I'm generally a very liberal person, but I count those populists to the toxic people and they should -in my eyes- all feel un-welcome where I am. Even in small quantities, they poison nice places and yell the loudest.)

make fun of people from Austria. [...] Servus [...] Krautchan [...] Do you happen to have better examples?

Yeah, I see you're well versed in internet culture, not many people know about Krautchan. It's really not a good example for anything because it mainly contained trolls and shitposting. They were a group of people mainly commemorating their inside jokes. They really worked hard flashig out details to stupid small jokes like the one with the Austrians. I've seen this specific joke on other internet forums, albeit not often and not anything close to that degree.

We have German inside-jokes here on Lemmy, you can check out the community [email protected] they do stupid jokes and innuendo, often about politics. But it's not related to the old imageboards.

I don't have any better examples. Well, jokes about stereotypes used to be a thing during the early parts of my life. Regarding regions: jokes about the inhabitants of East Frisia and people from East Germany. It was a play on stereotypes and on mainly on the same level with jokes about blonde women (stupid) and gay people. I think every culture has them. ("A texan walks into a bar in Ireland..." / "How do Mexicans sneeze? Quetzalquotle" ...) I've wondered lately if those kinds of jokes are still around. I think they grew out of fashion. But that's more playing with stereotypes than anything connected to language.

moderation for [minority languages] [...] I’ve concluded that it isn’t a big issue.

I agree. We should try it and see what happens, instead of coming up with hypothetical scenarios that are probably never going to play out this way. I know some people would disagree with that. For example here on Lemmy, the people from beehaw.org want to build something like a safe space. They have rigurously used defederation on other instances that have different approaches to moderation and signup. Sometimes even before anything happened. They won't like taking chances. But I think we have to be bold and try things. Lemmy still has a few technical shortcomings. But the general (federated) design allows us to do both simultaneously.

Sorry for not using German with you

That's perfectly alright. English is the Lingua franca (common language) here. I'm very thankful I have it and it grants me the opportunity to efforlessly talk to people like you. I think recent developments in AI and machine translation like the local translation feature of Firefox 117 will soon enough bridge the gap more and more.

I suppose it's difficult for minority languages. They are somewhat bound to become extinct. And people have to work hard to keep them alive. The world is very globalized. People commute to the next bigger city and work there. And generally move more often than they did a hundred years ago. Even in the small mountain villige in Tyrol in the Alps, the young people go study at an university in the city and a large percentage doesn't come back after. They used to have a distinct dialect in every valley, back when they weren't yet as interconnected as they are today.

I don't know what OP was trying to achieve with this post. They didn't engage in the conversation. I think internet communities have the abilitiy to connect non-english speakers. And even linguistic minorities. Lemmy would be a good platform for something like that. But I don't think a top-down approach works here. We can (and should) advertise the service. But I don't think doing missionary work will cut it. If you don't have any insight on the culture, it's really difficult to get to the people and make it a lasting and healthy thing. I wouldn't know how to attract a dozen of the few thousand Sorbian speakers to get something going. And I don't feel entitled to do so, either.

I've been imagining a federated platform that connects people who live nearby. As far as I know there isn't anything like that around, yet. And there are some privacy issues to tackle if you want people to share their location. My use-case for something like that was to use it for classified ads. Or recommendations about concerts and cultural events. Maybe we should program something like that and also have language and dialect be part of the design.

Thanks for all the references you gave. I really can't reply with anything of substance, here. I skimmed a few of the articles but I still have to read most of them properly. And I think I have to brush up on my knowledge about things like the Vergonha. For me, language discrimination hasn't really been part of my perspective, yet. I grew up and live in a city. Things are more connected and more diverse here, and it happens to be a region thats close to speaking standard German anyways.

It's really a fascinating topic. And encompassing lots of different dynamics. We can't go back to live all our lives in a few kilometres of our birthplace in order to nurture local things. We need a more modern approach. But it'd be nice to keep those things alive and even actively doing something for it.