There are way more than 5 aces, so I'm not sure where that number comes from, but he certainly does have a pretty insane record. Especially impressive given that Iranian F-14 pilots at the time couldn't get more Phoenix missiles from America due to sanctions (I believe), so there was heavy emphasis on trying to win engagements without using them.
Yes you are correct, there are more than 5, my bad.
>> Especially impressive given that Iranian F-14 pilots at the time couldn't get more Phoenix missiles from America due to sanctions
That is correct too. There was a short period in which they were able to get some more during the war but pretty much all they had was purchased before the revolution.
>> so there was heavy emphasis on trying to win engagements without using them.
So heavy that there is a story on how the Iraqi fighter had to eject in Kuwait because he used too much fuel (due extensive use of afterburner while shooting their missile). The Iranians were just trying to out maneuver the missiles shot at them since they did not want to use theirs!
Honestly, without a way to search content and not just people/hashtags, there isn't an organic way for me to discover people talking about what I'm interested in, so Mastodon just isn't useful out of the gate. It relies on finding a niche community you're interested in out of the gate, and if I wanted to go that route I'd just use Reddit.
I've never found anything like snouts.online on Reddit. Even /r/furry doesn't come close. It's the Anthrocon or MFF of subreddits. Furry may be a niche, but it's a big niche. Mastodon has several furry-focused instances with their own unique communities.
There are a lot of good subreddits, but the nature of the experience is different from a Mastodon instance. And a Pleroma instance will also be different because the choice of Pleroma over Mastodon is conscious.
Mastodon doesn't yet have communities centered around hashtags (like #amwriting or #mbmbam, for example) like on Twitter, but it's getting there.
The way I found people is that I knew one person who was using Mastodon and the looked at who they follow on there and who the people they follow are following and so on.
There's also the new 'Explore' feature introduced in this release. It will take maybe a week or two until enough people enable it, but it might be what you're looking for[1].
This is making a lot of assumptions about GP's reasons. They should probably have explained in the first place, but give them the chance to before suggesting they're angry about something they never brought up, please.
