I don’t speak Esperanto yet but I think it might be a good thing to have a community for, given the language’s internationalist nature and its historical connections to left-wing politics. If you look for federated Esperanto communities, one of them is basically locked because they moved instances, and the other is dead as a doornail.

An Esperanto comm could be used to talk about Esperanto history and culture and news from Esperantujo, or help people learn the language, or people could discuss language politics, et cetera, all in Esperanto. Hexbear does have that weird thing where it won’t let you post if you say that your post is in a language other than English, though.

An alternative might be to see if there are any Esperantist instances we can federate with.

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      I think that’s mostly covered by !worldbuilding@hexbear.net for fictional conlangs, and !conlangs@mander.xyz otherwise. There is also a !conlang@lemmygrad.net but that one’s dead as a doornail.

      The reason why I want to have a comm specifically for Esperanto is really for the specific subculture/community around specifically Esperanto. That community definitely does have an intersection with both the broader language learning community, and the broader community around conlangs, but it’s also clearly distinct from both, I’d say.

      • Imnecomrade [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        I don’t think I see any specific language as a community on hexbear, thus I figured a conlang community could serve the Esperanto community and pull the fictional conlangs from worldbuilding into a more relevant community, though I figured the conlang community would serve more real-world conlangs, such as the ones listed here, specifically the auxiliary and engineered constructed languages. I wouldn’t be against a separate hexbear community for Esperanto or any other language, but I figured there may be a reason for the limited generalized communities.

        I find the language Lidepla interesting as it includes more language sources beyond the romantic languages, though it’s request to obtain an ISO 639-3 code from the International Organization of Standardization was denied because it’s still too niche. I would consider this as an example that would belong in a conlang community.

        • FrogPrincessEnglish
          9·
          2 months ago

          Esperanto has 100× the traction of any of those, though.

          Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, and James Connolly learned it.

          It definitely has flaws, that other International Auxiliary Languages do better on.

          Lingua Franca Nova, Ido, Novial , Lingwa de Planeta, Lingua sistemfrater – all technically better than Esperanto

          Esperanto – way better than any of those for adoption, actual community, a million or 2 million speakers

          To give an idea of adoption:

          And when you compare it to a language like English… like it’s 6× easier to learn than English. And yeah maybe Ido is 10% better than that… but say English is 600 difficulty points, Esperanto is 100, Ido is 90… you’re pretty much fiddling in the margins at that point.

          • Imnecomrade [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            3·
            2 months ago

            Oh I’m not disagreeing, my only argument was regarding whether the community should include multiple conlangs or just Esperanto and maybe allow other conlang posts in the community, considering the current structure and style of hexbear’s communities.