Where are people getting the idea that it even has anything to do with the attack helicopter meme? Because both things reference flying military hardware? Because as far as I can see that’s literally the only “connection”.

The “aerosexual” thing is because people on NCD constantly post extremely horny art of anthropomorphic fighter planes. This has nothing to do with identifying as anything. They don’t want to be fighter planes, they want to fuck fighter planes, because if you’re not a weirdo who’s horny as hell for military hardware then what are you even doing on NCD? And the joke is, to be clear, entirely self deprecating. It’s “haha, we’re a really weird and fucked up community aren’t we guys?”

Well, I tried it, and it just sits there and spins an “in progress” wheel. No idea if those reports actually went through or not.

“Flag” is an extremely unhelpful label for a report function, but that’s not your fault. Thank you for letting me know.

Is there such a thing as a report button in Lemmy, because I can’t seem to find one?

They’re also sending them as messages.

This exposes a number of very serious issues with Lemmy.

1. The inexplicable lack of a delete option for messages in your inbox.
2. The fact that blocking a user does not remove or hide messages they’ve sent you from your inbox.
3. The lack of a report button.
4. The fact that it’s possible to send direct messages with inline images and have those images immediately show up for the end user (absolutely incredible that not one person ever said “Yo, what happens when people use this to send dick pics?”)

I’ve gotten some from @thewatcher already. Hopefully some mod or server admin can get on the job of banning them.

It’s precisely because I do understand the history that I’m “poo-pooing” the mass hysteria that’s going around here.

Everyone keeps citing examples like email and XMPP without actually stopping to think about whether they are actually comparable to what’s happening with Meta and the fediverse. Because they’re really not

You’re more than welcome to explain to me how Facebook’s dastardly plan to destroy Mastodon actually works, but I sincerely hope it’s more than just “Oh, like what happened with XMPP,” because it’s not. These are different situations, plain and simple.

Yeah, in effect all of email is already federated. Shared protocols won. It’s literally the opposite of what people are imagining is going to happen here.

I’m sorry but these arguments don’t hang together for me. The point of email is that you need to be able to communicate with everyone. That’s why blacklisting of self hosted services is forcing everyone into the big guys. But the people using the fediverse are already happy only being able to communicate with other fediverse members, so being excluded harms absolutely nothing. The fediverse was created at a point where monolithic social networks already existed, by people who wanted to get away from those things. We excluded ourselves right at the start.

The same goes for XMPP. If it was already viable as a communication platform, it would have been fine. It died off because it was always going to die off. Better alternatives existed. Google briefly interfacing with XMPP didn’t kill it, it put it on life support.

Are you willing to explain why? I couldn’t give two shits about anything that happens on Facebook / Threads / whatever else your racist grandpa is using, but I have not yet seen a credible argument for why being federated with them is bad.

Thank you for saying this. The panic I’ve been seeing over this decision is unreal.

Meta are not engaged in some grand scheme to destroy the fediverse. Meta do not give two shits about the existence of the fediverse.

Meta wants to destroy Twitter. That’s their only goal. Their only competition. They don’t have a plan for killing the fediverse because they don’t think it will ever be big enough to matter. And nothing about engaging with the fediverse gives them any leverage to do harm to it. There are so many whacked out theories about how this is some kind of attack but none of them even make any sense. “They’ll start cutting off smaller instances.” OK. So those smaller instances won’t be connected to threads. Right now I’m pretty sure no instances are connected to threads. Last week they certainly weren’t. And those smaller instances were doing just fine. We’re not talking about taking away oxygen. It’s just refusing something that nobody wants anyway.