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.

  • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
    12·
    19 hours ago

    It’s not that popular of a concept on here, probably since there’s massive selection bias (everyone here evidently found a way to struggle through), but you’re completely right and I find that that lazer focus on usability is one place that Open Source advocates and projects often struggle with.

    And personally, I think it’s because most open source projects are built and run by programmers since they’re the ones who can build an open source project, whereas a consumer facing site like Reddit / FB / TikTok/ IG, would be planned out and designed by a product manager, working closely with a designer and market researcher, and then get programmers to build that for them.

    It’s a model that’s really difficult to pull off though in a community primarily consisting of programmers volunteering their free time, but I think it’s worth keeping that in mind. Open Source projects that are consumer facing (and especially ones that rely on network effects), really need to work hard to stay in that user facing headspace.

    • AnonomousWolf@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      5·
      19 hours ago

      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.caEnglish
        4·
        19 hours ago

        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.eeOPEnglish
          2·
          19 hours 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.