Turkey is explicitly backing the Syrian Natonal Army (not the actual Syrian Army or the Free Syrian Army - splitters!) but it’s understood that they were also backing HTS to some extent (although not openly as they are still a proscribed organisation in a lot of western countries) and it was Turkey that greenlit the recent big push as their negotiations with Assad were going nowhere. So, while the West have been scrambling for some influence in Syria (and Russia and Iran have lost their’s), Turkey has been left as the main puller of strings in Syria. Their main concern is the Kurds and they were attacking them within a day or two of Assad falling.

!neodb@lemmy.zip is pretty much an everything database, so you can feed in films, TV, books, comics, music, etc and it can replace all the separate databases that have largely been bought up by Big Tech (often Amazon), like IMDb, Goodreads, etc.

It’s originally Chinese, so English language reviews are thinner on the ground at the moment but a lot of people are enthusiastic about it and I am hopefully it’ll soon take off.

This would be an interesting idea. There have been open source ecommerce solutions for a long time (Woocommerce is very popular), you could bolt AP to something like that and you’d have the next evolution of the Fediverse. Someone runs an instance for vintage clothing or fanzines or crafty things or art and individuals can set up their stores on it with the instance processing payments in return for a small cut to keep the lights on. Allow options like auctions or crowdfunding and things get even more interesting.

Now do Hubzilla!

Beans

No you are wrong about that.

That’s the trick.

You could, for example, have a bot running a text-based RPG in a Mastodon thread, where you get to see others in your group take their turns, then you have yours.

I think the best of both worlds would be if I could make an account on both and have one account essentially repost anything from the main account, unless I’m replying to someone specifically where it wouldn’t make sense to reply on both accounts.

That’s what I’d want from a bridge - something to connect an account at each end. If/when Bluesky suffers enshittification, it would mean that folks on Bluesky could just switch the direction of the bridge and start posting in the Fediverse. No sunk cost leaving you hanging on, no high barrier to moving.

It is odd when I see people compare Bluesky unfavourably with Mastodon when a lot of the features they want are on *key forks.

I haven’t tried it but I’ve seen various comments that suggest it works well. Time to do some research…

You can bridge the two now.

What is the incentive for people to host an instance at the moment?

I liked the community that had built up and wanted to help that continue.

Because people will choose convenience over their vey own survival.

See Cory Doctorow’s Bluesky and enshittification.

I just use Threadiverse and Threads can go piss up a rope.

Now there’s an argument to be had. I ave tried Mastodon and Firefish and found the latter to be far superior, feature-wise. I think Iceshrimp will be the *key fork that will finally the big breakout hit, especially with the Iceshrimp.net rewrite.

The best thing for on-boarding are topic-specific instances, it makes picking one much easier.

Mastodon isn’t even the best micro-blogging service on the Fediverse.

What would be the incentive for people to do that?

It’s all going well - everything is fully-funded and ticking along nicely.