Mastodon & Vivaldi Social

Frankly speaking I had no idea regarding the evolution of Mastodon before I stumbled upon it in Vivaldi’s blogs. It was quite an eye opener for me. I had hitherto read about Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird and various other browsers and email clients being open source, but I’ve never really heard of an open source social network. Long ago, before Facebook came into existence, I was exposed for a short period of time to Orkut (the little known predecessor of Facebook). Thereafter, Facebook began to rule the world and I was drawn towards it like millions of others. Twitter never really appealed to me and neither did Instagram nor Snapchat. My dalliance with the social media has been rather sparse to say the least. However, for those who are keen on social media, it is rather heartening to hear that Mastodon has evolved into not only this open source social media site, but it also is not owned by any corporate tech giant and neither do they use the much abused algorithm to track users’ news-feeds. Further, the concept of a federated social universe is also rather novel is many aspects. Not being locked onto a single server frees the user to a great extent. It also relieves the headache of an individual’s privacy being compromised. Glad I heard about such new concepts such as Mastodon and “Fediverse”. Definitely broadens my perspective of the tech world.

Good luck to Mastodon and Vivaldi Social users. Good to know that the tech world is evolving and evolving rather fast. And it is indeed invigorating to know that the eternally cherished principles of freedom and individual privacy are here to stay !

woman sitting on cliff raising both hands

12 replies on “Mastodon & Vivaldi Social”

  1. Tell me, have you actually tried Vivaldi’s Mastodon instance yet? I’ve never used Twitter (except to follow march updates on football club’s feed) so don’t have a Twitter account: I’ve never seen a personal need for it. Reading press articles about Mastodon and the events since the Twitter take-over by Musk, I’m a it more interested, but stull unconvinced. Mastodon seems to be more complex to set up an account, and I’m not quite I fully I understand this federation thingy, nor how I can contact, or follow or however you term it, someone whose account is on another non-Vivaldi hosted instance. And vice-versa….

    Any thoughts, everybody?

    1. I’ve not really given Mastodon a try since I do not want to jump onto the social media bandwagon once again, but from whatever I have read in the Vivaldi blogs, this seems to be rather promising. Fediverse ensures that one company does not get a monopoly over the social media universe . However, having said that, I do agree with you that understanding Fediverse can be difficult since we do not know the intricacies of how it actually works, or as you said how different people logged onto different servers can actually communicate with each other. Still I am sure it can be a source of relief since its users are not bombarded with ads on their news-feed and nor are they subjected to algorithms that make them the actual product in the business.

      1. Hello, I read your blog with interest.
        Thank you

        Now I know why I can’t find you in the Vivaldi forum and on Vivaldi-Mastodon.
        I read more here 😉

      2. ‘MeWe’ was recommended to you.
        Well, there are also some quite critical voices about it.

        May I recommend ‘Jabber/XMPP’?
        I think it’s a very good, modern, open source messenger, where many people have their own server, which is also federated.
        Which unfortunately, or maybe not so unfortunately, is not so widespread.
        Maybe you could just have a look at it.

        And of course I also recommend Vivaldi’s Mastodon instance 😉

        1. Thank you very much for your kind comments. I will definitely give Jabber a look, though I have mentioned earlier that blogging appeals to me more than social media or messengers of any kind 🙂

      3. “Between cups of coffee and writing for my next novel, blogging is something that appeals to me the most.”

        Oh, this would of course interest me …
        😉

      4. In ‘Jabber/XMPP’ there is also a literature, poetry room and a literature café with ‘Jitsi Meet’.

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