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.
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
Same here for 99% of the time, Sync for Lemmy is how I see and prefer this type of site.