Note that Japanese X lacks a lot of the political insanity of normal X (or even Bluesky). They mostly discuss culture, hobbies, interests, and daily activity, rather than whatever outrageous thing some political lightning rod is doing at that moment.
Just goes to show how much our online behavior and trends are determined by algorithms. The translate button has been there for years, but I guess some engineer flipped the "show international tweets on the timeline" button last week and this is the result.
I really wish Elon had sold off the Japanese side of X to Yahoo/Softbank. He could probably have made back everything he spent on it in the first place and then it could be its own thing.
That isn't exactly new. There had been Google translate support. They swapped in Grok more recently.
The various art, anime and vtuber fans were following Japanese accounts for a long time.
You miss the key point here. Before, you had to manually click to get the translation. Now, not only it's automatic, foreign posts are also relevant/arrive to your own feed.
I didn't miss the main idea of the article. I am, in fact, responding to an idea it states directly.
Has been a thing for a while and I almost exclusively follow Japanese accounts. Sometimes it's the only place that certain Japanese artists post their work.
Me too. I deleted all of my posts, comments, likes and follows except for a couple of Japanese accounts (primarily Aya Nishitani, author of Shin Megami Tensei, who posts a lot of interesting stuff about Japanese and Western occultism sometimes in English.)
Can confirm Japanese X is great, the translate feature in general is a lot of fun and works incredibly well, I didn't realize the tweets were translated for the longest time.
(X as in Twitter, for those this clarification saves a click.)