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.
I think they’re complaining that Lemmy uses the older method of blocking instead of the more modern version.
The old way of blocking is that you don’t want to see a person, but they’re still free to do what they want. It’s just not shown to you. So they can still read everything you post and downvote or reply to it as they please.
The modern way is to prevent the blocked user from interacting with you at all, including seeing your posts.
I don’t use Lemmy, so I don’t know which it uses, but it sounds like OP is arguing that Mastodon uses the latter but Lemmy uses the former. Reddit used to do the former but eventually changed to the latter.