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.
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