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.
I think it would also be nice for there to be default blocklists, or at least some easy-to-access blocklists to import. After I joined Lemmy, I spent a lot of time blocking basically every single community in my feed that was dedicated solely either to memes or to news and politics. The thing is, I want politics in my feed, it’s just that the social environment in big politics communities here tends to feel not very conducive to in-depth political discussion or to topics other than the top 3 or so topics on Lemmy users’ minds at any given moment.
I imagine many new Lemmy users probably join and get overwhelmed by all the memes and politics flooding their timelines, and then many of them just leave. I don’t blame them. It’s a lot of effort to filter your timeline to remove what you don’t want, and there’s no guarantee that at the end of the process there will still be anything remaining that you like. So I wish that newcomers who want to filter out the loudest communities didn’t have to repeat the work of creating a new blocklist each time, but rather that there be publicized, easy-to-find blocklists to enable people to easily customize their feeds upon joining.
So something like https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/21844005 ?
Yes, something like that, but preferably with more choice (e.g. a “Do you want to hide political communities by default?” option when signing up just like the option for showing/hiding NSFW content, and an ability to unhide communities without also subscribing to them.)