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.
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:
https://eo.wikipedia.org/ – 359 344 artikoloj en Esperanto
https://io.wikipedia.org/ – Hodie (jovdio, 3 di oktobro 2024), ni havas 50 461 artikli tote en Ido
https://ia.wikipedia.org – Al momento nos ha 29 719 articulos.
https://ie.wikipedia.org/ – 12,858 articules in Interlingue/Occidental
https://lfn.wikipedia.org/ – Aora nos ave 4,446 articles.
https://nov.wikipedia.org/ – Disum es li Wikipedie in Novial! Nus nun have 1,665 artikles.
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.
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.