When I talk about the importance of going all in on the Fediverse, I speak based on experience.
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When I talk about the importance of going all in on the Fediverse, I speak based on experience.
At Opera we built a massive user community. When I quit, we had something like 35 million registered users and 35 million monthly visitors.
The new Opera management did not see the value of that. They believed it was cheaper and better to just use Facebook and that investing in your own community was a waste of money. So they closed down MyOpera and built a following on Facebook and Twitter instead. Then they got caught by the bait and switch when Facebook changed and you would no longer reach your audience, without paying. Later on Twitter changed as well.
This is important to explain to companies and institutions as they go shopping for social media sites to invest in. The best investment is clearly in your own site, being part of the Fediverse. It is not even all that expensive to do. It may take longer to build, but at least it is your own.
Not saying you cannot build a following on those other sites, but your long term strategy should be the Fediverse with your own server.
We try to lead the way here and thus we build Vivaldi Social. Not just for our selves, but to make a point and support the Fediverse.
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Albert Cuesta :verified:replied to Jon S. von Tetzchner last edited by
@jon Absolutely, Jon. We talked about it a while ago at the MWC in Barcelona.
I've been trying to explain this to many companies and media. But they are moving in flocks to Bluesky, which may well end up as another X.
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Hotspur🏳️🌈🇺🇦replied to Jon S. von Tetzchner last edited by
@jon You're providing a strong example to the world. If they don't follow, that's their problem.
"Building new" should apply to more than things you can easily monetize.
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Jon S. von Tetzchnerreplied to Albert Cuesta :verified: last edited by
We have to keep pushing. Clearly they should have be learning something on the way. It is not only Facebook and Twitter. There is a lot of other social media companies that are no longer there. It is best to invest in your own, interconnected site.
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@jon imagine ActivityPub had happened before/during Opera Unite.
(I wrote about it some time ago, this <http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/opera-requiem-3/> may be interesting for you —beware of typos though ;-))
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@jon It's all about short term results, making number go up for this quarter. Long term thinking has been abandoned. It is an American business mental illness
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🇵🇸 Panino, o Moço 🇮🇷replied to Jon S. von Tetzchner last edited by
@jon oh, the tragedy... I had a little blog there and Opera Mail was my main mail service! It hurt to lose all that.
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Nicole Parsonsreplied to Jon S. von Tetzchner last edited by
Rent-seeking middleware can always be used to extort concessions and hijack your user base of customers & vendors
1. Apple & Spotify - rent seeking middlemen between musicians & music lovers
2. Health insurance - rent-seeking between health care providers and patients
https://pnhp.org/news/the-economist-rent-seeking-in-americas-health-care-system/3. RealPage - Rent-seeking between landlords & tenants
https://brianlovin.com/hn/34926683
4. Search engines
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers
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When I demonstrated Opera Unite to the then Chief Architect at Facebook, what he saw was distributed Facebook. That was one of the things you could have built with Unite. It was groundbreaking, but sadly the new Opera management did not agree with me on that and binned it, just like they binned Presto a few years later.
At Vivaldi we will continue to do our best to move the Web forward. We have the same passion a lot of us had at Opera and we use that passion to help make a better Web!
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Indeed. It was a crazy move.
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JoeBecomeTheSunreplied to Jon S. von Tetzchner last edited by
@jon The mistake myOpera made was that given enough support from Opera, they could have carved out a significant niche in the social media space if they had simply stood by their product and the people who used it. Getting 35 million monthly users is not exactly easy, and the fact that there were so many eyeballs in one place is valuable on its own.
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Jon S. von Tetzchnerreplied to JoeBecomeTheSun last edited by
@JoeBecomeTheSun , the mistake was really to stop supporting it. When I was there we built it up to those 35 million. Sadly the new management was as clueless as you can get.
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@jon
it's the same with the cloud vs your own servers
AWS and Azure used to be much cheaper, now they're cheaper only at some cases, but the damage, that has already been done to the server infrastructure of medium size companies is too expensive to revert back -
@albi , that is true. We do not use the cloud at Vivaldi. We host things our selves. We did the same at Opera when I was there.
I like being in control over our own infrastructure and I know our users expect as much as well.
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@jon I had one of those MyOpera blogs. I also helped with a localisation thing and Opera sent me chocolate and a neoprene phone case thing. Good memories.
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When we started with Vivaldi, we started by making the community available with blogs and forums. We felt it was the right thing to do for all those that had set up an account on MyOpera.
Vivaldi.net is not as big as MyOpera yet, but we have almost 2 million accounts set up so far.
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Geoffrey Giebelhausreplied to Jon S. von Tetzchner last edited by
@jon Curious, as someone learning. If say I wanted to make my own server for Mastodon, would I not loose the benefits of the live feeds for browsing posts by others on my server?
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Jon S. von Tetzchnerreplied to Geoffrey Giebelhaus last edited by
If you were the only one on that server. Now you are on one of the larger servers, so likely going to live feeds from all servers would not be all that different.
In any case, I am not recommending you to leave your current server. What I am talking about is for companies and institutions to set up servers. I think this makes a lot of sense for universities and the like. You can then have the local server for those that are members of the university, but still be able to link to people on other servers.