It’s almost two years since we launched our Vivaldi Social mastodon instance which now has just shy of 56,000 registered users. We started this because we love the idea of a distributed social network based on open standards with no owner, no surveillance capitalism, and no tracking or profiling of users.
On Mastodon, you see a reverse chronological list of posts from people you follow. That’s it. There’s no algorithm or billionaires promoting posts based on their popularity or virality, or whether someone paid to promote them.
Today, Vivaldi is proud to be a launch partner of the Social Web Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the social web. Also known as the “Fediverse”, the social web is a network of independent social platforms connected by the ActivityPub protocol, which became a W3C standard in 2018.
Users on a participating platform can follow their friends or interesting people on any other platform on the network — liking, commenting, sharing and posting together.
The Fediverse reminds us of the early days of the Web. We are competing against silos and corporate interests, using a W3C-based open standard and a distributed solution. It’s great that social networking companies are supporting the Fediverse, and Vivaldi is pleased to support Social Web Foundation so that we can once again have a town square free of algorithms and corporate control.
The foundation’s program will concentrate on:
- Educating general and targeted audiences about the social web
- Informing policy-makers about issues on the social web
- Enhancing and extending the ActivityPub protocol
- Building tools and plumbing to make the social web easier and more engaging to use
We’re contributing because we feel that corporations have multimillion dollar marketing budgets, so a decentralised network of networks needs stewards to raise awareness in government, businesses, software vendors and, yes, users.
Vivaldi Social was a natural progression for us, given our existing reliable alternatives to Big Tech — a feature-rich and flexible browser with a built-in mail client, calendar, and feed reader.
Working with social media companies and other tech companies to launch and support the Social Web Foundation is the next step in our fight for a better web.
