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.
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.
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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 )
- LW
- lemm.ee
- lemmynsfw.com - not suitable
- sh.itjust.work - shit in the name, not appealing to the average user
- lemmy.ml - power tripping https://feddit.uk/post/12952230
- lemmy.dbzer0.com - requires to follow and agree the Anarchist code of Conduct - not appealing to the average user
- lemmy.ca - Canada-oriented, non-Canadian users might not want to join as they wouldn’t think they would belong
- feddit.org - German-focused, https://feddit.org/c/main content is in German
- lemmy.blahaj.zone - queer-focused
- programming.dev - programmers-focused
I made a more complete analysis in this post https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37336391 (pinned on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com ), nowadays I basically go with:
" Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/settings/install if you want an app
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?
Lemm.ee tries to be as middle-ground as possible and defederates from no “controversial” instances
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
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.
I would suggest something like https://phtn.app/ as an alternative desktop frontend (also has mobile view support)
This looks so nice!!
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.
But it’s not serious and evokes images of a spotty teenager in a basement.
Defaulting to any one instance would be against the goals of federation, I think. Much better to have a centralized site to help people find an instance that uses factors that wouldn’t bias too much. Perhaps pushing towards “general purpose” instances that would make geographical sense. And then you could highlight instances that cater towards more specific groups. But I think the goal of this would be to spread users across many instances rather than funnel them all towards one.
I might propose having something things like server ping be a factor, and capacity of the instance. Perhaps instances could also be shown with their largest communities so that people could see the vibe of the instance before they join.
A geographically based default is a great idea.
I completely agree. People who have never had to do this before May not know what to pick and never sign up because of it.
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.
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
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.
Feel free to crosspost to !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com, it’s a community dedicated to promote Lemmy and make it more welcoming to new joiners, so your post would fit right in!
Thank you, I will do that and join their cause
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.
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.
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
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/
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.
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
I always use an app so I barely interact with the 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s my point, it’s so many loops people aren’t going to jump through.
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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.
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?
Isn’t there a new UI in the works for the 1.0 release anyways?
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.
