There is a reason such a large part of Lemmy is developers. There’s no confusion signing up for the developers. Federations and servers and instances are all crazy jargon to regular people. Although we may not want all regular types here, having some more regular people to balance out all the high IQ techies could make things more fun.

New users get overwhelmed with decision fatigue, especially when they have average intelligence.

When selecting a federation, new users should be told:

“Because Lemmy isn’t run by a large corporation, lots of small volunteers run Lemmy and run different copies of Lemmy at the same time. These different copies are called instances. You can choose 1 or just click the large red button and we’ll randomly select one of the most popular instances for you. If you aren’t sure what to choose, just press the button!”

I remember being curious about the fediverse and when I first looked and saw “instances” I got decision fatigue.

I didn’t know if an instance would limit me from interacting with others, could randomly disappear (ie hexbear domain), or if some instances would be a bad fit. I also didn’t know of it was unchangeable. Decision fatigue set in and I was less excited, but still registered.

To overcome that, there should be a “randomly choose for me” button with notes next to it that say you can change later, it won’t impact things, and you can interact with any instance. For random selection, just make it the top 3 most popular instances. Use a fun icon to indicate random change so the on boarding user has to think less.

Instances seem very confusing to an average user, as does federation. There could be an explanation like "Instead of 1 big company controlling everything, there are many copies of Lemmy that are in different places run by volunteers. These “instances” or copies are all Lemmy and can interact with each other, but having many copies means there isn’t ever 1 big company who can set all the rules and suddenly change thing in a bad way. " and then the random selection button which almost everyone would choose.

The average user dosn’t want to RTFM and also has an IQ of around 100 which is really low. The average reading ability of someone in the USA is like 6th grade level or something atrocious. You can’t overestimate average intelligence in an in boarding process.

He may have made a calculation about this not based on money and can’t disclose it without altering the calculation.

Example:

Scenario 1: Tell Trump to fuck off for treatment of transgender people. Result: Trump using monopoly power to break up Facebook, truth social increases in power, no way to monitor hate groups effectively

Scenario 2: Pretend to agree with Trump and move hard right, monitor hate groups, come back slowly center in subtle ways, no rise in Truth Social users, ability to shape acceptance over time

Even with fuck you money, saying fuck you makes scenario 2 possible. Say what you want avout Zuckerberg, but he’s no idiot. If I as an indifferent person can do a simple decision tree example in 3 seconds in my head, imagine how much he analyzed such a big decision.

My point is Facebook sucks because they make it almost impossible for users to use Facebook without submitting to surveillance capitalism and ban people without giving them recourse in a mean shitty way. He must be aware of that and for allowing that, he sucks. And as a US company that is likely in bed with surveillance capitalism and the intelligence community, their “private” ways of verifying individuals is unlikely to be private, and they offer no alternative. So he sucks for that, but I’m not sure he specifically sucks for this reason. He’s even heavily implying strategic thinking is requiring him to do things he otherwise wouldn’t and can’t discuss it without altering the outcome.

Whether the end never justifies the means (same “we won’t vote for Kamala because of Gaza stance” mindset) is better ethically even if impractical is another debate.

I hate Facebook and that they will ban people, without notice, unless they record a video selfie from multiple angles, and then still sometimes permanently ban people even then, without a way to pay to prove the person is real or talk to someone or even get a reason for the ban. I also think Facebook is an arm of the government and is not really a company (quasi-governmental) and is basically a corporate rebranding of LifeLog and Zuckerberg probably got a 1600 on his SATs and was recruited to join the government while in high school.

So that all being said, despite my hatred of Facebook, what he is saying isn’t that illogical.

Let’s say Zuckerberg personally supports trans rights and thinks Trump is an idiot. He can’t say that in a meeting that will obviously have leaks. It would be “value-destroying.” Say what you want about Zuckerberg, but most people with enough intelligence don’t hate trans people because they understand science and how prenatal hormone conditions and epigenetic conditions means that sometimes internal senses of gender don’t match biological at birth sex. (Musk is the rare exception to this and it seems like his reaction comes from ego and anger about being estranged from his daughter and autism/lack of empathy, and so he’s a weird data point that doesn’t neatly fit if we take his reaction at face value.)

So let’s say Zuckerberg wants to say “We support trans and gay people, we have to do this so Trump doesn’t go after us to remain profitable and not end up needing to decrease our head count, I hate Trump.” If he said that, someone would immediately leak it, Trump would go Ape Shit, and the company would lose value.

It’s hard to know for certain if this is what he’s talking about, but if he is, this isn’t really something to fault him on.

Facebook labeling linux as somehow evil, on the other hand, is a bizarre and shitty thing to do, so fuck Facebook and fuck this asshole who is letting linux be labeled as a cybersecurity threat. I also think Facebook doing this is because government, which has backdoors in Microsoft and Apple OSes, doesn’t like linux and sees it growing in popularity and so I believe the government requested Facebook do this. I can’t fathom a social media company would do this for no reason on their own, it makes no sense, but if Facebook is Lifelog and always has been Lifelog and Zuckerberg gets his orders from someone else, then it would make sense that they implement policies regarding labeling linux as bad to try to keep their backdoors in as many users’ OSes as possible.