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’m going to disagree on this one, I’ve seem far too many comments, especially from LW users, along the lines of “I can’t be bothered to change websites because I’m already settled in.” Most people are attached to their posts and content and consider moving instance as “losing progress”. And the bigger an instance is the harder it’ll be to leave if they ever pull something seriously “power trippy” that could lock off content to some people, because there will be a large mass of communities and posts on that instance.
It might be ideal to randomly default one of the top 10 instances
The user can still choose to not go with the default, it might also spread out users more.
Currently I think people just looks whats fhe biggest, and join that. Thats basically what I did because it was overwhelming to pick