Getting started with Vivaldi Social
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What is Mastodon?
Mastodon is a type of server software that provides access to a decentralized open-source social network (some people also informally use the word Mastodon to refer to the actual network itself). This network is made up of countless privately operating servers or “instances”. Some are public for everyone to join, others have restrictions on signing up.
Vivaldi Social is one such instance and everyone with a Vivaldi account can join. Vivaldi Social is run on Vivaldi’s servers in Iceland and is administered by the Vivaldi team. You can post short posts, images, links and more, to share your thoughts and ideas with the world. It works similarly to most other social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook.
Users on Mastodon instances can follow and interact with users on their instance, but they can also follow and interact with users on many other instances. You can think of Mastodon instances like email service providers. With any email account you can potentially message anyone, it does not matter who provides the underlying services or if you are on the same service as your friend. This is also true on Mastodon and the Fediverse.
What is the Fediverse?
In the same context as Mastodon, you will often also hear the term “The Fediverse”. Mastodon is currently the most popular Fediverse server software. The Fediverse, or sometimes just Fedi, stands for Federated Universe. It’s a collection of many different, independent social media servers (others include GoToSocial, Pleroma, Friendica, and PixelFed), which can interact with each other. The servers can do that thanks to a common technical standard called ActivityPub.
Joining Vivaldi Social
To join Vivaldi Social all you need to do is to go to https://social.vivaldi.net and log in with the account you use for other Vivaldi services, such as Sync. If you don’t have a Vivaldi account yet, there is an option to create one directly from the Vivaldi Social website.
You can also join Vivaldi Social from your favorite Mastodon desktop client or mobile app. When logging in, search for our instance social.vivaldi.net and follow the login instructions.
Account information and connecting with others
- Your Vivaldi account’s short form username (used for login) will be of the format:
JohnDoe. - Vivaldi Social’s instance name is
social.vivaldi.net
To help friends to find you, give them your your username in long format @[email protected] (it looks like an email address with an extra @ at the beginning). Your friends can use this to look you up by searching for it in the search feature on their own instance. After locating you in this way, they will be able to follow or click on your name to see your profile.