Defaults are crucial for good UX and getting more users on the Fediverse
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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.
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So one thing I wonder is if there would be some way that when they are creating an account, for them to put some info in- mostly language spoken and maybe preferred country to start and it randomly selects a default general interest server. That might help onboard people easier without everyone joining one instance
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Years ago I did a UX study on Lemmy's frontend, and tbh not much has changed since. Things like when editing a thread, the Save button is multiple proximity separators apart from the text you're editing, making it very easy to missclick cancel. Or in the community search, you can't search on specific instances that aren't yours.
I've gotten very used to the UI over time but it definitely needs a "pain point" passover
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Does lemm.ee have as obvious a political stance as LW?
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The only time I've seen my instance brought up in comments and whatnot is in discussions about how we don't block any other instances. I'm out here rawdawgging all the propaganda baby
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But it's not serious and evokes images of a spotty teenager in a basement.
