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.
Default instances would go a long way, I know there’s a lot of hate for lemmy.world but defaulting to the biggest instance or a random one in the top 10 would help ease some of the early friction. Users can choose an instance later when they get more comfortable with the platform.
Federation is neat but the average person just wants to scroll and chat
Top 10 ( https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list )
I made a more complete analysis in this post https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37336391 (pinned on [email protected] ), nowadays I basically go with:
" Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
Feel free if you have any questions"
Because yes, the USA/EU question appeared during the Luigi announcement in LW.
Does lemm.ee have as obvious a political stance as LW?
What “obvious” political stance might that be?
To me, it’s “somewhere on the progressive side of the median” but I’m almost expecting you to say “fascist” or something, given the extent of America’s polarization.
Another thing: in popular communities the comments are coming from all over, so without keeping a mental tally of everyone’s usernames I find it’s getting quite hard to pin down any particular instance’s biases.
Neoliberal is what I’m referring to.
This was exactly my point! “Neoliberal.”
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.
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.
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.
I’d rather join-lemmy (and join-fediverse) were smarter.
Have a series of questions (for join-fediverse add “what service do you want?”):
Where are you?
What languages do you speak?
Select your hobbies from the list below:
And it then spits out 2 or 3 instances.
It’s what I’d do if someone asked me directly for a recommendation and should be relatively easy to do.
As we say with someone posting a link to db0 on r/piracy, if you just say to people “this is the instance for you” and it seems relevant then they make the jump. I’m tempted to go to the main subs for Canada, Australia, the UK, etc and just post a link to the relevant instance.
Be ready to get your post removed for self promotion, and yourself banned. That’s what I noticed on most countries subs (except Australia I guess? [email protected] still thriving everyday)