Funny how “self awareness” has two meanings here. It’s the essence of what makes humans the smartest animals, but the problem you’re referring to—lack of self reflection—is one of the most common problems amongst people today. Common sense ain’t so common.

Like most popular social media sites, you usually won’t see very valuable discussion in the comments, at least in my experience. It’s mostly for people to post news, research, and so on, and follow the big names or organizations in their field.

Most of the valuable information is diffused via posts but I do put a bit of time and effort into trying to filter out all the crap posts like memes, the faux inspirational stuff, self-aggrandizing nonsense, etc.

I recognize that my intrusive thoughts are my own, but this term existing is helpful because: 1) some people incorrectly believe that thoughts imply a desired outcome, and this term helps explain and describe that this isn’t always the case and 2) it’s a meaningful and useful way of categorizing these types of thoughts for the purposes of psychology, psychiatry, understanding ourselves better, etc.

In cases like severe OCD, classifying intrusive thoughts as such could help someone understand and cope with disturbing thoughts and develop subsequent coping mechanisms. Not everyone’s the same and some terms can be helpful.

I think the fundamental question is, as the Fediverse gets more popular, then how will servers get paid for? Here are some possibilities I see for how Fediverse hosting could work at scale:

• Surviving off donations alone: Possible but in my estimation unlikely, and it could veer into the territory of big donors having a controlling stake or exerting their interests.
• Instances limiting number of users to what they can afford: This would require the network of instances process to really work well.
• Big instances selling advertisements: Without oversight or moral commitment, this could easily go towards creepy personal data collection.
• Crowdsourcing the costs: This would require transparency and fundraising or some other model
• Hosts financing the operation in other ways: This could also easily get into creepy data collection practices or other dark patterns.

I hope we come up with some process or plan for avoiding the pitfalls and forging an honest and community-integrating way forward.

The threat is a new sustainable community that’s sheltered from advertising that people could leave Factbook/Instagram/whatever and go to.

So then why was Meta trying to get Threads to be on the Fediverse? Of course they’re aware of any potential threats, no matter how small.

IQ is mostly a pretty arbitrary and pointless metric because things like attitude, process, and creativity matter a lot more for getting results, but it can still help to diagnose learning disabilities and it has a solid statistical underpinning. The only thing it strongly correlates with is chess ability.