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.
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)
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.
An anarchist instance having strict rules is quite ironic.
I would suggest something like https://phtn.app/ as an alternative desktop frontend (also has mobile view support)
Thats very nice actually, can it be self hosted? Might use that as my desktop frontend.
This looks so nice!!
I really don’t understand how this is actually a problem. It’s just “shit”, that’s very moderate profanity.
Some people are used to browse Reddit at work. Browsing a website with shit on it isn’t ideal.
honestly when I joined I thought it was “shhh 🤫 it just works”
But it’s not serious and evokes images of a spotty teenager in a basement.
Does lemm.ee have as obvious a political stance as LW?
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
Haha, I am too ;)
Lemm.ee tries to be as middle-ground as possible and defederates from no “controversial” instances
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.”
By that I mean the renewal of capitalism over state as economic and general government policy, not “democrat/liberal.” But liberals are neoliberal as they subscribe to that ideology as a fish subscribed to the water they live in.
At heart, liberalism just means putting the individual before the collective. So there can be lots of varieties of liberal. But a debate on terminology will quickly get quite boring. From what I can tell, this community is hardly even liberal, let alone neoliberal. That was my point. It seems that people are seeing in others the ideologies they want to see.
I’m not debating terminology I just thought based on your comment that your mistakenly thought neoliberal meant liberal not new liberalism. It’s confusing they use the same root :)
I disagree. I mean LW is neoliberal in they see keeping the western gov status quo as good.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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"
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’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
[email protected] has plenty of reports from power tripping mods on popular instances, those instances are still the most used
Fair, maybe we can randomly select one of the top 10 to suggest as default. 🤷♂️
Idk the best solution, we can do AB testing if needed
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.
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