Here is a nice short video with our team member @ruario giving a brief explanation of Vivaldi Social, our #Mastodon instance, which is now open to anyone! ? #Introduction
@ruario@aral@jon@Vivaldi That is true, and I'm not expecting any convincing to happen in a short conversation :blobcatgiggle:
I want y'all to understand that this place has existed for a long time and it's been an important home for many people who've sought refuge from the capitalist internet here.
You have a lot of responsibility to not fuck things up and I want to be vocal and direct about making you aware of this.
@spacekookie@aral@jon@Vivaldi Trust is earned of course. Nothing I say right now will instantly convince you because you do not know me or us yet. However if you use your search engine of choice to read what Jon has said in the past he is very consistent in his support for open protocols.
But again this is trust and trust is earned. I do not expect to convince you in a thread like this. ??
@ruario@aral@jon@Vivaldi Companies have far greater social and technical reach than the individual contributors and small communities that are currently running things.
It's not about access. It's about an imbalance of power. The concern isn't that a vivaldi instance _exists_ per say, it's about the technical and social power that puts into the hands of a very small number of people.
Thus what @aral brought up in the OP and down-thread: What's the plan here? Why should we, people who have literally built this place, trust (the royal) you?
@aral@spacekookie@jon@Vivaldi Growth of an open system over a locked one (e.g. Twitter). You do not all have to have accounts here and let's be honest most people will not.
That is fine. I do not think that providing access to the fediverse or offering an instance to anyone who wants to join, no matter what browser they use is an inherntly bad thing.
@spacekookie@jon@Vivaldi This is also good question. And what kind of growth. Because vertical scale is very different to horizontal scale.
One idea of growth is having several million people on vivaldi.social. Another is having several million people, all with their own instances. And there are likely gradients in between (e.g., small instances for interest groups, local communities, schools, families, etc.)
With regards to the sale of Opera, just to be very clear. That happened after I left Opera and would not have happened with me still in charge. Same applies to the death of the core of Opera, Presto, and the overall product strategy change.
I believe in open standards and that is what we will follow and support. We want to help Mastodon grow, not divide it.
@Vivaldi@jon Well, Opera was sold to a Chinese consortium for ~$600 million if I remember correctly so let’s leave that to one side :)
My worry is seeing posts like this https://social.vivaldi.net/@daniel/109347059648513928 and that you’ve already extended Mastodon by providing log in with Vivaldi accounts. (This makes perfect sense for you and the people who use the browser of course but it already gives Vivaldi an experience advantage.) So I’m thinking what other features could be added to Vivaldi to extend Mastodon?…
@aral I suggest you look at things our founder @jon has said during the course of his career at both Opera and Vivaldi. He has consistently pushed for open protocols and interoperability. I can promise you we will not go back on that now and try and embrace and extend. It is against the very core of what we want to do.
I realise this requires a leap of faith and we are open for more discussion.
@aral This is a really tricky balance though. Right now smaller instances struggle and not everyone can self host even with great services like @mastohost
If you do not know as as a company it is hard to see and trust our motivations. We get that but our motivation here is to try our best to help, not take over the fediverse.
@aral Decentralisation is indeed super important and there are clearly already growing communities around specific topics. We want to see more of that! In addition and number of organisations have started to open instances. This is also fantastic… more please!
We will see how this plays out. Our primary motivation here is to provide something for people who cannot find an instance that works and is snappy and as a service to our own users.
In the spirit of keeping the fediverse decentralised, would you be open to agreeing to a maximum size (e.g., N active accounts) for your instance from the outset? (And what’s the N you’d be happy with?) Thanks!
@mkljczk That's the plan, but we're still working on it. In the meantime we quickly implemented a solution one of our Community members, @AltCode, suggested.
Why is the Share article button for Mastodon vivaldi.social-exclusive, instead of using a modal asking for instance url? The same /share schema is supported by every Mastodon and Soapbox instance.
@Vivaldi@ruario Thank you for setting this up and pleased to be here.
One question though, as we access the mastodon instance via the vivaldi.net account, there is no option to add 2FA - which in my opinion is essential to protect both accounts.