cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/55334864
Small things like ‘Auto expand media’ being set to true, can have a huge impact on user retention rate.
The vast majority of people never open or change default settings in the social media they use.
When they try out Lemmy etc., and the defaults aren’t great a lot of them will have a bad User Experience and leave.
I’m a IT professional, and joined Lemmy a few months ago, the UX sucked, most of that could have been fixed by having good defaults in place.
I powered through, but I won’t recommend Lemmy to many of my friends or family because I know they will give up due to too much friction in finding the right settings and how things work.
For the Fediverse to succeed focus needs to be put on giving people a very smooth UX from first opening a app or page, to finding enjoyment seeing and engaging with content.
I think it would also be nice for there to be default blocklists, or at least some easy-to-access blocklists to import. After I joined Lemmy, I spent a lot of time blocking basically every single community in my feed that was dedicated solely either to memes or to news and politics. The thing is, I want politics in my feed, it’s just that the social environment in big politics communities here tends to feel not very conducive to in-depth political discussion or to topics other than the top 3 or so topics on Lemmy users’ minds at any given moment.
I imagine many new Lemmy users probably join and get overwhelmed by all the memes and politics flooding their timelines, and then many of them just leave. I don’t blame them. It’s a lot of effort to filter your timeline to remove what you don’t want, and there’s no guarantee that at the end of the process there will still be anything remaining that you like. So I wish that newcomers who want to filter out the loudest communities didn’t have to repeat the work of creating a new blocklist each time, but rather that there be publicized, easy-to-find blocklists to enable people to easily customize their feeds upon joining.
So something like https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/21844005 ?
One should ask themselves: “Do I want to meet more users who never change default settings in my social media?” However you answer this question should determine how you make your app.
You’re eliminating like 90% of the population if you do that. And creating a bubble of tech savy people.
Which is fine if that’s what you’re trying to do, but I don’t think that’s the goal.
I think the lemmy UI is fundamentally flawed, defaults are part of the problem. I love card posts but lemmy’s version is unbelievably bad, it just doesn’t look good to me. I only ever use custom UIs for lemmy.
Also, don’t forget the language issues dear god.
Also, don’t forget the language issues dear god.
+1. It’s not the most glaring issue (I would consider the lacking of a unified linking system pretty problematic) but I have no doubt it’s too much for quite a few users too.
They should force users to choose their languages, or at least select all languages in the beginning.
Indeed. Maybe with a 1st language and then other ones as needed. And then have the 1st/default one selected for every new post/comment.
Mine would be set to English by default, but I would be able to select French when I need it.
Thank you for crossposting here!
We should experiment with setting different defaults for new users.
For new signups, set ‘Auto expand media’ to true for half of users, give it 3 months or a year and see what effect it has on user retention.
What about most of the users which use apps like Voyager, Thunder or Sync, and won’t be affected by server-side settings?
That’s a separate issue, the app devs need to think about that, and it looks like they take much better care than the web view
