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.

#fediverse #Mastodon #Twitter #Threads #BlueSky #Vivaldi

@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 ;-))

An Opera Requiem, Part III: requiem for the open web?

Revisting the open web 10 years after the rendering engine switch of the Opera browser.

wok

@oblomov

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!