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.
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.