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.
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.