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 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.

@albertcuesta

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.

@jon @albertcuesta

Turnkey Fediverse nodes seems like a requirement for not particularly tech savvy progressive organizations.
They may have a stable of data analysts, probably some light web developers, but not server building/management people and definitely not any management interested in managing that kind of function.

@joeinwynnewood @albertcuesta

That is a business opportunity, to help people get small and medium sized servers onto the Fediverse. I believe there are already some around and I am sure there will be more, like there are for Minecraft. That means organizations can do things in stages. Start small and gradually build their own.

@jon @albertcuesta

Re: That's a business opportunity
Totally agree.

If you know of anyone I/they might want to talk to, I'm all ears.