this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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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
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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.

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[–] smeg@feddit.uk 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We have a few different frontends available on feddit.uk, you can easily tell a new user that there are different ways of viewing the same content and to pick their favourite

[–] AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Sure but is the default https://feddit.uk/ ? because that sucks, and many people will give up before finding https://p.feddit.uk/

[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 3 points 1 week ago

It's something I've raised with the other Admins and we may see if our users would be up for swapping the default frontend to one of the others.

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I am almost certainly not the "normal" user, but the default theme is much better usability wise than the "p" version. The one would have me looking for an alternative UI/app.

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

I get that, but we need to cater for the massss if we want to see lemmy grow

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Why do we need to change what current users already like to attract some theoretical new user that might want a dumbed-down view? This is starting to sound like infinite-growth corpo speak!

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's a lot of margin between 47k monthly active users and infinite growth

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

True, but this also isn't corporate America that needs to chase users to make the graph go up. New users will come or they won't, I think chasing them is a fool's errand.

Edit Oops, an important word!

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What makes you think it sucks? That's just your opinion, do you mainly just look at image posts? Personally I prefer posts being collapsed by default so I can scroll through and find the interesting ones. Arbitrarily setting one thing as the default is just as bad as setting another.

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Years ago I did a UX study on Lemmy's frontend, and tbh not much has changed since. Things like when editing a thread, the Save button is multiple proximity separators apart from the text you're editing, making it very easy to missclick cancel. Or in the community search, you can't search on specific instances that aren't yours.

I've gotten very used to the UI over time but it definitely needs a "pain point" passover

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I always use an app so I barely interact with the web ui

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 1 points 1 week ago

Same here for 99% of the time, Sync for Lemmy is how I see and prefer this type of site.