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
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.
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.
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 know I favour this, but I may be biased.
My main tip for picking an instance is go for a region or topic specific instance so your local feed is manageable and relevant.
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’m going to disagree on this one, I’ve seem far too many comments, especially from LW users, along the lines of “I can’t be bothered to change websites because I’m already settled in.” Most people are attached to their posts and content and consider moving instance as “losing progress”. And the bigger an instance is the harder it’ll be to leave if they ever pull something seriously “power trippy” that could lock off content to some people, because there will be a large mass of communities and posts on that instance.
It might be ideal to randomly default one of the top 10 instances
The user can still choose to not go with the default, it might also spread out users more.
Currently I think people just looks whats fhe biggest, and join that. Thats basically what I did because it was overwhelming to pick
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