The thing of it is, if you just highlight some text and hit the heading button in the GUI, it doesn’t include the space.

It doesn’t display headings, I know that much.

#Heading

Was it actually him? I was under the impression that history did not relate what happened to him afterwards, nor who he was. That’s not to say the CCP did not murder a couple of thousand people during the crackdown regardless, because they did, but I have never seen a verifiable claim that a picture of any particular corpse actually was the Tank Man. There are numerous theories I’ve seen floated over the years alleging what may have happened to him afterwards ranging from him being caught and imprisoned, executed, living anonymously in China, or fleeing to Taiwan. All of them are unverified and, of course, mutually exclusive.

The tank operators absolutely did attempt to (and succeeded at) avoid running him over. That much is plainly visible in the video. Whatever happened after the video ended is undocumented and pure conjecture. Plenty of well documented atrocities actually were committed that day, before and after that moment, so there’s not much sense in inventing new ones and bickering over details we haven’t actually got.

Well, I agree with it anyway. So there.

This is the way.

Plus, it’s your instance so it’s your call.

No, there isn’t. This is the clearest case of black vs. white you’re going to experience all week. Blocking Meta is not “sticking our heads in the sand.” There is literally no benefit for us allowing them to integrate with any of our explicitly non-corporate platforms. But there is a huge (and in their eyes profitable) benefit for them. If there weren’t, they wouldn’t try. So answer me this, what do we actually stand to gain?

Bots? Misinformation? Having our content redisplayed on Threads for profit? Ads? Corporate accounts spamming us incessantly? Corporate moderators, corporate instances, corporate communities where all the messaging is controlled? Having our content used to train AI’s? This is all the crap we escaped when moving here, rather than using the existing social media network products. What, is Mark Zuckerberg going to cut instance operators a check to help with their overhead expenses for all the content he’ll steal? Don’t make me laugh. You can see posts that were made on Threads? If anyone actually wanted that, they’d just use Threads to begin with.

The argument is that Meta integration will allow the Fediverse to become “mainstream.” Well, Lemmy and Mastadon are already doing just fine without Meta. They will continue to do just as fine without them in the future, barring any catastrophic reddit style administrative fuckups on any major instance(s). Meanwhile, there is enormous risk in allowing Meta to have their way with us, our platform, and our content. None of the other hot air matters one bit no matter how it’s phrased. It will be much healthier as a whole for Fediverse platforms to grow organically without corporate (and frankly, evil) influence. And if that means they remain smaller communities now or even forever that’s okay.

The openness of the “open web” stops precisely before bad actors are allowed to co-opt it for evil purposes. Companies like Meta always have as their end goal a closed walled garden for their users remain trapped in to have profit extracted from them. Well, let them have it – on their own, without us. We need to set the precedent that those of us who give enough of a shit to use Fediverse platforms in the first place cannot be bought or sold. They’ll talk about “openness” now but I guarantee you the design is for that to be a one way street.

No means no.

Never means never.

No Meta means no Meta.

Nothing else needs to be said on the subject.

The notion that anyone should interact with Meta at all is enough. You lost me right after that part. Anything after that is just meaningless apologetic noise for the sake of appearing nuanced. That’s the bullshit.

No means no. Never means never. No Meta. The extremism, the “big symbolic action,” it’s all warranted. Block them. Block them forever.

P.s. You’re allowed to use cuss words on the internet. Tell your friends!

And that’s part of the point, as well: There are tons of people on here putting forth the effort to post content on a deliberately non-corporate platform, to make lemmy.world a great place – as well as other instances.

Meta is a for profit company. Everything they do is to turn a dollar. Rest assured, they would not have any intention of attempting to integrate with the Fediverse if they did not have some plan to make money off of it. And I for one do not consent to Meta and/or their advertisers profiting off of the work and content I have posted outside of their platform.

This entire argument is bullshit. Meta needs to be an island from our perspective. Let them do their thing over there, we’ll do our thing over here. Their goal is to lure (probably former reddit or twitter) users to Threads and then cut off the greater Fediverse as a whole once their user base is established and much larger than ours. And they want to use our numbers to boost their for profit platform to make it appear more successful.

Separation from these kinds of corporate entities is exactly what the Fediverse is about. We can talk about “open” all we like but there is already a short list of bad actors we don’t allow here: Nazis and fascists, pedos and kiddie diddlers, etc. We can add Meta to that list as well.

We don’t want them interacting with us at all. Get out the hammer and ban them. Entirely.

I’ll add an edit to say this: I say that defederation is not extreme enough. They need to be blocked. Instances need to implement ToS and licensing that prohibits them from hoovering up and regurgitating our content. We need to start outright blocking Meta at the network level. Whatever the hell it takes. Line in the sand. No means no.

No Meta. Ever.

Think of this: In the past, we have never had any choice other than to roll over and accept whatever bullshit the major social media companies push on us. If you want to communicate, if you want to use any platform, if you want to be in, you had to deal with them and their system. Because they were big and you were little, and what are you going to do about it? You have no choice but to roll over.

Well, we don’t have to roll over anymore. We have this one – and believe me, only this one – opportunity to unequivocally tell them NO. We are not your product. You have no value to us. You aren’t a monopoly anymore. We do not need your corporate influence, we do not need your corporate bullshit. We are free of you, and we don’t need you.

Another edit: Oh, look. What do I find right at the top of my feed first thing this morning? Why, it’s yet another example of Meta being evil. And you still want them to have influence in the Fediverse?