Defaults are crucial for good UX and getting more users on the Fediverse
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Default instances would go a long way
No, suggesting actual websites to people, rather than "Lemmy", would go a long way.
Default instances result in centralization. In recreating the existing structures that, ostensibly, we're all here to reject.
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Everything boils down to preferences, but Lemmy defaults is not necessarily keeping up with the trends. Small thumbnails were more useful back when internet traffic was slow and/or expensive, today it's more of an acquired taste.
I wish different instances dared to have more different defaults, so that one instance would look significantly different from another beyond just colour scheme. I still haven't seen a single instance run something like Alexandrite or Photon by default, and while I guess there are good reasons for that I think it would have been a welcome addition.
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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 tolemmy.ca/c/...URLs as a tiny user facing feature for Redditors coming over, and they did it in a second. -
Yeah, if I hadn't been so committed to Rexit, I doubt I would have stuck around long enough to find a UX that I liked. Just to name one, it'd be nice if MLMYM were a default skin.
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That's my point, it's so many loops people aren't going to jump through.
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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.
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Once people are in the ecosystem it's easy for them to move around, if eg. lemm.ee mods go on a powertrip it would be such a smooth transition for people to switch.
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There's faster ways to get data. We can do a few surveys on existing users. We'll get hundreds of responses easily. Perhaps multiple surveys, one for each setting.
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But it's all public, right? You can't block people from seeing stuff you post publicly.
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That's a great idea, how can we get this ball rolling?
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If people went as far as registering in a Lemmy instance, they clearly have some affinity towards the Fediverse. Getting through Fediverse to work nicely for them is what bridges the gap. It's the same with anything people do. Better defaults is a trivial low hanging fruit that can help perhaps significantly.
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That's a great point and a really low hanging fruit that would likely help with adoption and retention. The defaults weren't great for me either.
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Defaulting to any one instance would be against the goals of federation, I think.
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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
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Sure but is the default https://feddit.uk/ ? because that sucks, and many people will give up before finding https://p.feddit.uk/
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Agreed. And the default UI hasn't even gotten attention in the past. It's just there. My experience with Lemmy has been that the devs fix bugs, but they're mostly focused on the backend. I'm not sure aboit the consequences, though. A lot of people seem to be using phone apps, so their default might not even be Lemmy's UX.
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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.
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I agree, a gateway drug is what we are looking for. Imagine trying to learn how to run before you learned how to walk. We are asking a lot of the masses if we want to see user growth here without a simple and easy to understand starting place.
I think the hardest concept for beginners to grok is that they can’t login with one account to all instances. If we were to improve the UX around that experience solely, we would see greater adoption.
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sh.itjust.work - shit in the name, not appealing to the average user
I really don't understand how this is actually a problem. It's just "shit", that's very moderate profanity.
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Yeah also the blocking instances capabilities on Lemmy are a fucking joke
Block an instance at user level? You still have to deal with their users and you see crossposts
Defederate an instance? You still see their crossposts if someone from another instance does it
What part of that counts as blocking? It should be as nuclear as possible, that's what blocking is for, because someone doesn't want anything to do with them.Also I know Lemmy is not private, but not being able to completely delete posts/comments still irks me.
