One thing that’s different today is authentication options. Modern APIs (eg WebAuthn), Oauth, passkeys, WebID… Also password managers were not as ubiquitous as they are today.
I think there’s the potential to make using many different sites a lot more frictionless nowadays.
Maybe the only missing part would be an aggregator to keep track of the different communities.
Those technologies may be frictionless for users to sign on, but they're not frictionless for administrators to deploy. Creating a new subreddit is as simple as clicking a button and filling in half a dozen fields or so, plus toggling some checkboxes, and you're done! Plus it's really easy for users to find your new subreddit via the site search.
Just think of what it takes to get a new forum going: purchasing a domain name, setting up hosting, installing the forum software, setting up the aforementioned authentication APIs, dealing with SEO so people can actually find your site on Google (that one seems almost impossible now). It's absolutely dizzying. At least something like Lemmy solves all of this for you, bringing you back to a Reddit-like level of effort.
"Heads Up" but online and in multiple languages at the same time, e.g. even if an English word is up to be guessed, you can enter the equivalent word in Spanish or German, and you will get points for that, too. I created this because I like word games like that but my friend group is quite multilingual and most are not native English speakers.
Your comment just motivated me to write another blog article about something recent I've learned. Thanks ^_^ My last post had already been more than a year old :O
Based on what I've seen source code is almost exclusively English, apart from a few identifiers here and there that are hard to translate, e.g. legal terms.
Oh the poor people who try to learn German by reading Kafka.
I'm not sure literature in general is suitable for learning a language that you don't already have a tight grip on. Maybe children's books, but even then it's too far removed from spoken language for some languages.
I've found the concept of extensive reading with a 98% threshold (that is, you must be understand 98% of words on a page) to be pretty effective in picking up foreign languages. Less than that and I give up. You're right, starting to learn German through Kafka is going to lead to bad times. I tried that with Mandarin and a translation of an Orhan Pamuk novel and gave up some twenty pages in after a brutal slog.
Having some simpler and easier selections ala Lingua Latina (https://lingualatina.dk/wp/) would definitely help. If you haven't heard of it, that is a book for learning Latin Wooten entirely in Latin. It starts off with very simple grammar and vocabulary and adds more each chapter. You can find digital copies pretty easily.
It's certainly interesting in theory. But in practice, how do you distinguish between a bookshop, library, office and desk when all of those things can be referred to by "maktab"?
And does inferring / generating words this way actually work? For example, can I say "makra" (مقرأ) for "Library", a place where you read? Based on the verb "yakra" (read).
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