Fediverse

30302 readers

886 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Posts must be on topic.
Be respectful of others.
Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

199

Defaults are crucial for good UX and getting more users on the Fediverse (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

85 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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 to lemmy.ca/c/... URLs (rather than 404ing), as a tiny user facing feature for Redditors coming over, and they did it in a second.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

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.