The weirdest thing about this discourse is that people against it somehow seem to be very convinced self diagnosis is exclusively done based on internet memes or something along those lines. I spend years researching, reading multiple books by actual experts, reading scientific publications and hanging out in autism spaces to see if I fit in.

… Almost like somebody who tends to … Oh idk have a special interest.

And the contra side also dismisses privilege. It’s known that autism is under diagnosed in minorities. And things like I’d need to travel 5 hours (one way) multiple times to get a diagnosis. Potentially staying overnight. They’d want to talk to my abusive parents. I’m chronically ill. It’s not realistic and I live in a country that has reasonable health care. I wouldn’t magically be employable afterwards anyway or have some other tangible benefit. I’d just get somebody in a 15 € white coat tell me what I already know. Or dismiss me because they read me as the wrong gender and yolo autistic people don’t have humor.

Same. What a dismissive person.

How old is your brother? I’ve been hella awkward until about my mid 20s (there were complicating factors delaying my social development) but I’d like to think my social gaffes are a lot less intense now. AFAIK many autistic people adapt a little more with age.

I like what others said about learning how to communicate in memes to connect with your brother. Memes might be his native spoken language. It can help him a lot if he isn’t the only one speaking that language.

The tips you gave him probably don’t make sense to him. Trying to find a better time when he probably doesn’t understand social context well might have gotten translated to “wrong time of the day, try this one after 1pm”. If he is interested you could explain social context to him on a case by case basis an explain why sometimes things are funny and sometimes they aren’t. But it’s exhausting work.

If memes really are his native spoken language you asking him not to think in memes might have sounded to him like “don’t think in words” (because he doesn’t know another way to think) which is a confusing request and he probably only agreed to make the confusion go away.

I’m shit at making posts. But I can recommend stealing copying content from reddit.

I miss r/aspiememes. A lot.

started with connect for lemmy. which is visually very clean but it neither has an edit comment function nor a block user function yet. lemming has both functions but loks a lot more clunky.