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.
It’s not that popular of a concept on here, probably since there’s massive selection bias (everyone here evidently found a way to struggle through), but you’re completely right and I find that that lazer focus on usability is one place that Open Source advocates and projects often struggle with.
And personally, I think it’s because most open source projects are built and run by programmers since they’re the ones who can build an open source project, whereas a consumer facing site like Reddit / FB / TikTok/ IG, would be planned out and designed by a product manager, working closely with a designer and market researcher, and then get programmers to build that for them.
It’s a model that’s really difficult to pull off though in a community primarily consisting of programmers volunteering their free time, but I think it’s worth keeping that in mind. Open Source projects that are consumer facing (and especially ones that rely on network effects), really need to work hard to stay in that user facing headspace.
That’s the problem yes, but we can make small changes that will have a huge impact.
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.
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 (rather than 404ing), as a tiny user facing feature for Redditors coming over, and they did it in a second.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.
won’t recommend Lemmy to many of my friends or family because I know they will give up
Yeah, when I first started out here, my experience was like this:
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I went to the join Lemmy page, then clicked to show all servers. Then waited. And waited. Then I went to bed.
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By the next morning, the list of servers had managed to load. I spotted one that was advertised as “recommended for users to join to reduce load on the Fediverse”, which seemed like a good idea after seeing how even the join page was battling to load.
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Found out that the server I joined seemed to have all sorts of issues loading content. And was apparently de-federated from a bunch of instances that align with my interests. So search results were showing me little to nothing in regards to queer communities for example, only dead communities.
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Signed up on world instead and encountered multiple posts that said they had comments but loaded nothing. Found out that there were no languages selected in my settings. So I selected ‘undefined’, scrolled down, selected ‘English’, then saved.
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I was still missing a bunch of posts after that, so I went back to settings and saw that ‘undefined’ was deselected again. That’s when I realised that you have to ctrl click each language you choose or else it just deselects the previous language that you clicked on.
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Finally success! 3 or 4 days later. And now I’m here.
I would love to recommend Lemmy to the few people I know who use Reddit. But I can’t see any of them trying without just giving up and going back to the place where all you need to do is sign up and hey presto, content to look at and interact with.
I have a feeling that even the process of choosing an instance would probably put them off. I could give advice but there’s only so much I could do or explain without being there in person helping them. If they have to read walls of text explaining how to get started, it would probably end there.
I’m not sure what the solution is though, or if there even is one. It might just be a little bit like trying to recommend Linux to people who just want to be able to push a button and go. Which is the majority, based on what I’ve seen.
Also just one last thing and something that has been discussed to death. There’s just not enough content here yet for the average person to see any reason to switch over from the place with all the content.
And on that note, recommending this place to people that I know in real life would be too risky right now that they would see my account and figure out who I am. Because there isn’t a crowd of a million people to slip into and disappear here. And this isn’t Facebook. I don’t want people to know about the very personal things I sometimes say on anonymous social media.
- I was still missing a bunch of posts after that, so I went back to settings and saw that ‘undefined’ was deselected again. That’s when I realised that you have to ctrl click each language you choose or else it just deselects the previous language that you clicked on.
This actually took me multiple months to figure out, Lemmy felt like a ghost town, now it feels like a small town at least
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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.
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 about the consequences, though. A lot of people seem to be using phone apps, so their default might not even be Lemmy’s UX.
Which in turn is probably the reason why the devs dont focus on Web ui
Mastodon: When you block someone they no longer can interact with you or your content Lemmy: When you “block” someone they can mine your content forever
Nothing you can really do about preventing someone from looking at your posts unless you make your profile private, and I don’t think Lemmy has that concept.
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.
But it’s all public, right? You can’t block people from seeing stuff you post publicly.
Can you explain?
I think they’re complaining that Lemmy uses the older method of blocking instead of the more modern version.
The old way of blocking is that you don’t want to see a person, but they’re still free to do what they want. It’s just not shown to you. So they can still read everything you post and downvote or reply to it as they please.
The modern way is to prevent the blocked user from interacting with you at all, including seeing your posts.
I don’t use Lemmy, so I don’t know which it uses, but it sounds like OP is arguing that Mastodon uses the latter but Lemmy uses the former. Reddit used to do the former but eventually changed to the latter.
Personally I find the UX better on PieFed (unless it’s for a part where most of the development hasn’t happened yet, so yeah it’s hit or miss). See e.g. the tiling view.
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.
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
Sure but is the default https://feddit.uk/ ? because that sucks, and many people will give up before finding https://p.feddit.uk/
I am almost certainly not the “normal” user, but the default theme is much better usability wise than the “p” version. The one would have me looking for an alternative UI/app.
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.
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.
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.
That’s a great idea, how can we get this ball rolling?
Since the project is already okay with Github, perhaps a set of polls in Github with this feature, linked far and wide in Lemmy.
Isn’t there a new UI in the works for the 1.0 release anyways?
I had to find this theme (and tweak the colours a bit) to just stand the site. The userscript Lemmytools also helps a bit, albeit half broken.
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That’s my point, it’s so many loops people aren’t going to jump through.
I don’t give that much importance to the default but I wish I could turn it on and off easily without having account. Some instances I’ve visited have enabled it by default when I don’t want it, and vice-versa.
While this is of course true (and I too have professional experience in this field), my own experience is the opposite. The UX and defaults here are generally better than on, for example, the R-site.
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.
I would run one if it was worth running, but for me none of them reach the default level let alone exceeds it. But I guess everyone is different, and it’s open source so anyone can see all the code and make it look however they want. So I guess we just really need someone that does frontend design and wants to make something better.
I believe, like I saw mentioned above, that that default theme is also set to change with Lemmy 1.0 release.
I personally value the decentralization and personal control a lot more than laypeople being arsed to try to figure it out. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t even be here in the first place. Why try to accommodate for users that don’t give a crap about the main selling point by diminishing the said selling point?
You would still have control over it. It would just remove a barrier to entry.
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.
Not a lot of thought was put into selecting the defaults, all I’m saying is at the very least we should put thought into the defaults that are set. It takes away no control from the user.
