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How do you want pronouns to be displayed in PieFed? (piefed.social)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/meta@piefed.blahaj.zone
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I'd love to hear everyone's ideas for how we can improve the way pronouns are shown in PieFed. Please let me know if this is the wrong place for this question and send people here if you think they'd like to contribute.

Currently, you can put pronouns in your display name, and in the extra fields on your profile. Display name federates fine to everywhere while extra fields only with Mastodon and friends. Like this:

2uyNQpWE0qJ00FY.png

Can we do better, though? How would you like it?

e.g. when showing a popup card, the pronouns in the extra fields could be more prominent, up near the name near the top?

vOJS7LexuoKr0SZ.png

Or maybe when someone is replying to you, the placeholder text inside the text entry field (before they start typing) could say what your pronouns are? Like this:

dOznVBKiJjvo4fl.png

Those are just ideas to start a discussion, not options to choose from - maybe you have something completely different in mind?

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[–] 1 point 9 months ago* (2 children)

I might be in the minority here, but I like the options we have today.

Individuals can choose to include their pronouns in their display name if they like. This info is highly visible, being present on all posts and comments a person leaves. If users want to broadcast their pronouns this way, they're welcome to do so.

But I also appreciate the flexibility for people who want to make their pronouns available to anyone interested, but not necessarily make it a part of their display name. I'm in that camp. For people like me, keeping a slot for pronouns in the user's profile / bio page is perfect.

Being able to do both, either or neither is great!

I absolutely love the creativity of using auto-clearing placeholder text in a reply's text body to remind folks of pronouns. That's really cool! But as a practical matter, when I write a reply to someone I'm always using English second-person pronouns (you/your/yours), so I generally don't need to know the gender/pronouns of the person I'm replying to. What you'd need are the pronouns of the person you're writing about, not to. It's still a slick idea, though!

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    What you’d need are the pronouns of the person you’re writing about, not to

    Oh yeah! That does take the shine off it somewhat.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    Somewhat. But when writing in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Polish, Croatian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbian, Russian, Madeonian, Bulgarian, Latvian or Lithuanian (and maybe Greek? And how about the Gaelic languages?), you do need the information about genders when writing an adjective about the person you are talking to. So in Spanish "you are lovely" is "eres encantador" or "eres encantadora" depending of whether you're talking to a man or a woman.

    Additionally, in most Slavic languages, whenever you talk about anything that has happened in the past, you must always tell the gender of the subject.

    So, "Anna, you flew!" and "Michał, you flew!"
    are in Polish "Anna, ty poleciałaś!" and "Michał, ty poleciałeś!".

    oh, vocative?
    Polish has the vocative case, so maybe I should have put the names in vocative case in this example? But because that only affects how the names are written, not the word for "flew", I didn't spend the time to go learn that part of the Polish grammar right now :)

    You almost always need to know the gender of the person when talking to them in a Slavic language, and you often need to know it when talking to them in a Romanic language. So, good info to have!

    (...and of for me, as a Finn... In my mother tongue there is never any need to know the other person's gender when talking to or about them. Except if you want to explicitly use the words "man", "woman", "boy" or "girl". But even then you can just say "adult" or "child", so whatever.
    Every Finn lives their first 7 years without caring a damn about their conversation partners' genders. They are all just people, and that's enough for almost any situation.
    It's interesting how often you see children in English classes get angry at the teacher for having to differentiate between "he" and "she". An argument I've often heard is "It is such a hassle for no reason!"
    In my eyes, all these very visible gender declarations are programming my brain towards thinking more about people's genders, while I would prefer just ignoring the whole concept of genders in my thinking.)

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