this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
198 points (98.1% liked)

Fediverse

30254 readers
536 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Xylinna@lemmy.world
MrCenny@lemmy.world
TragicNotCute@lemmy.world
automodbeta@lemmy.world
woelkchen@lemmy.world
198
Defaults are crucial for good UX and getting more users on the Fediverse (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
85 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's the problem yes, but we can make small changes that will have a huge impact.

It's a very easy change to default 'Auto expand media' to true for half of new users, and see what effect it has over a few months. It's also a fun experiment with no real drawbacks.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It's a very easy change to default 'Auto expand media' to true for half of new users, and see what effect it has over a few months. It's also a fun experiment with no real drawbacks.

Writing the code to do that is very easy, determining what metrics are actually important and impact user success and what metrics accurately track user success is much harder.

I do generally agree though! Personally I just asked the instance admins of lemmy.ca to redirect lemmy.ca/r/... URLs to lemmy.ca/c/... URLs (rather than 404ing), as a tiny user facing feature for Redditors coming over, and they did it in a second.

[–] AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago

Sure pulling the metrics might be a little harder. But it costs us basically nothing to experiment.

Small changes like the one you mentioned is a big win, these things add up.