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I’m no longer on helpdesk duty, luckily. However, one thing I’ve learned is that people are lazy and will lie. Constantly. Even if they’re being nice. Even if they know what they’re talking about.
You say you’ve rebooted your modem. I want to believe you, I really do, but I need to make sure you actually rebooted your modem. At first, I believed people, only to find out half an hour later that the modem has an uptime of three years and the post-reboot reconnect I’ve been looking for in the logs never took place.
You say you’ve just changed your password and still can’t log in. I want to believe you, but resetting the password again takes 30 seconds and troubleshooting a lazy lie takes 10 minutes.
And for the love of god, don’t pretend to check if you’ve plugged everything in correctly when it takes exactly as long as actually checking. When I say “we should check the cabling” that’s not an insult of your intelligence, that’s a step towards resolving the problem you’ve been having for weeks.
I know repeating troubleshooting steps you’ve already done is a massive pain. I hate it just as much as you do. But sometimes, after telling me what you’ve figured out yourself, you just need to let go and do what I say if you want your problem resolved. I know the stuff I suggest doesn’t always make sense, but the shit we’re selling you doesn’t make sense if you look beyond the surface. And yes, I’m just as frustrated about the idiotic workarounds necessary to make anything work, neither one of us has the power to actually change this.
Also, don’t try this “I know the manager/boss/CEO” bullshit. Even if you’re telling the truth, nobody really cares. It’s not the flex you may think it is. Oh, and threatening legal action only slows down resolving your problem, because now someone senior needs to evaluate if you’re actually going through with a lawsuit, and every procedure needs to be double-checked to make sure you won’t win.
Lastly: when I link you something, and you call me because you “don’t understand”, I’m going to go through the steps I linked you step-by-step, directly quoting the text provided. If I’m being paid by the hour, I don’t mind that much, but you could save both of us a lot of time by at least trying to follow the manual.
Pretty funny to quote the GDPR consent description when the website shares your visit with Google without your consent (through Google Fonts), as well as various other third parties.
One important addition to the considerations: don’t join ActivityPub if you’re successful or popular. The way the community responded to BridgyFed showed that large parts of the Fediverse want it to stay their own little obscure corner away from most of the world, and that doesn’t even touch the whole Threads thing.
There are exceptions to this rule, like being a Cool Internet Company such as WordPress/Tumblr, where forced login prompts and ever shittier paid subscriptions are tolerated because these companies have a historical cool factor that other companies don’t have.
As for legal consent, make sure you know the legal obligations that come with consent if you run a product or service as a company or organisation. You may be required to tell end users what profile information you’ve shared with what servers when, that you’ve encrypted your database, and may be required to enforce deletion of PII on remote servers as the primary responsible party for protecting your users’ privacy when your users withdraw consent.
Or you can just ignore the law, which most of the Fediverse seems to do, including several government servers.