How i built a Real-Time Multilingual Social Media Platform using Lingo.dev

When we started building Nativly, we didn’t set out to “add translation.” We were trying to solve something more fundamental: Why should language decide who gets to participate in an online community? Most community platforms assume English. If you don’t speak it comfortably, you adapt — or you leave. We didn’t want adaptation. We wanted inclusion by default. This is the story of how we built a real-time multilingual community platform using: Next.js Supabase Lingo.dev SDK And how we made translation feel invisible. The Problem We Faced Static UI translation is easy. You use i18n. You add JSON files. You translate buttons. But Nativly isn’t just UI. It’s: Posts Comments User bios Community discussions All user-generated. And here’s the real challenge: If a Hindi user writes a post, a Spanish user should read it in Spanish. An English user should see it in English. A Tamil user should see it in Tamil. Same content Different viewer Real-time Pre-translating every post into 20 languages?