Excellent point. Fidonet, Usenet, IRC, even email lists all solved this problem decades ago. And they mostly worked quite well. The web based generation was a step backwards in many ways.

Meh, beehaw seemed promising until they unilaterally decided to cut off large parts of lemmy. I get why, but I moved to another server because I want to control my own experience

Tbh I feel like the language attribute is poorly implemented in lemmy, or at least in the client interfaces I’ve used. Why is it necessary at all?

for PCs you can just add a hosts file entry, but that’s probably not possible/too much work on phones. split horizon DNS is what you want.