A thread on what's going on with Vivaldi Technologies, the makers of the Vivaldi browser (https://dndsanctuary.eu/index.php?topic=2820.0).
My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil (https://vivaldi.com/blog/google-return-to-not-being-evil/)
I never liked the blogging platform at vivaldi.net, and evidently they at Vivaldi didn't like it either. For a while it took a day or two to get a blogpost out (because of censorship? what a silly idea), then for a while the blog dashboard was difficult to find, hidden somewhere. And right now they are apparently moving the blogs section to Wordpress, which is another thing to be avoided, as everybody knows. Anyway, I can't find my old posts (I use them for my own reference, but of course I can't use them for reference when they cannot be found) and I cannot add any new ones.
(because of censorship? what a silly idea)
Probably more the porn spam.
Probably, but this makes the blog unusable. Imagine a forum where you have to wait a day for your post to appear.
Didn't they also do something where all blogs were "global"? As in, rather than my.opera.com/ersi/blog-post-title they'd be vivaldi.org/blog/blog-post-title-1234 because 1233 people already used the same title.
Yes, and this made it very hard to find blog posts by any particular user, including oneself. Right now the posts are frankly not there.
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/21736/can-t-log-in-to-blog
Taking a quick peek around, are they at username.vivaldi.net now?
https://ersi.vivaldi.net/
Looks like they got it working now. It will be great, if this naming scheme stays put. Different from the previous convoluted way of finding one's own blog and the RSS feed for it, things are straightforward now. For the time being.
But I note that they have been quiet concerning the photo albums. I guess those were deleted.
It's been 4 years already? Wow. One of the last posts I made on the Vivaldi forum was about this RSS issue (that was still an issue in 2017?):
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/227/blog-ux/3
Back then you had to add something like &user=name somewhere in the link to get to a specific blogger's RSS feed. I figured it out by trial and error, but it worked max for a year.
Their website seems pretty much down now for half a day or so. What gives?
From their Twitter feed.
We’re currently experiencing some issues with our websites. We are looking into it and doing our best to fix it ASAP. We apologize for the trouble and thank you for being patient with us.
Still seem to be having issues.
Today I managed to update the snapshot.
A nice article of general value on Vivaldi blog, about paywalled (and unpublished or incompetently published given the digital age) science
The biggest offender I’ve come across for failing to archive are conferences though. The ones I follow (typically Computer Science ones) make their PDFs available online, but there’s no guarantee they’ll stay there once next year’s web site goes up.
Amazingly, this is so true. Conference organisers seem to be mostly party people, people celebrating the moment of gettogether, never minding about having concrete references back to the event, presentable to third persons.
What a weird article this is. In the end it turns into an ad of Tutanota email, which is apparently unrelated to Vivaldi. The article would make some sense, if Vivaldi's email were based on Tutanota. But there are more anti-Vivaldi features in this article on the Vivaldi blog.
How to stop the online tracking machineGoogle knows everything you’ve searched for. Google stores your search history unless you delete it. But you must make sure to delete it in your Google Settings, not just your phone history, for example. Click here to see your own data [https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity].
PlayStore, YouTube, Gmail, Google Translate, tracking possibilities for Google are endless. Google knows what apps you use, when you use them, who you communicate with.
Yes, Google does all that, particularly when you are logged in to the Google services. I went to the Myactivity page and there were some Youtube videos listed that evidently were tracked when I was inadvertently logged in to Youtube on the smartphone. Nothing else. I figure Google only reveals very little on that page.
But Vivaldi browser also invites you to log in, same as Google Chrome. What does Vivaldi record when I am logged in? Where do I see it and can I delete it? I guess I can see and delete about as little as on the Google's Myactivity page.
The challenge today is to stop this unlimited data mining, to stop online tracking. The problem is that the most commonly used tools are provided for free by a handful of tech companies. These companies have based their business model on excessive data mining and, thus, have no interest to stop.
[...]
We have to stop the tracking machine, not just for us, but for the good of society. The only way we can achieve this right now is by limiting the power of data-hungry tech companies that do online tracking.
Right. And, other than size, how does Vivaldi differ from Google?
Google still sends broken code to Opera, just like a decade ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkayN3xiRDc
https://twitter.com/ruari/status/1207599969248710656
Consider the (Linux x64) User Agent for our current Vivaldi stable. It reads like so:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.99 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/2.9.1705.41
Really? In my testing, Vivaldi always, since day one, showed the UA identical to Chrome where things mattered, falling back to Vivaldi when it didn't matter. So your current change does not change anything.
A change would be permitting users to change the UA manually, instead of via an extension. Well, even that would not be much of a change. It would be just giving the users what they were used to with Opera.
I have been browsing the W3C ActivityPub (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/) spec. Basically Twitter/Mastodon, and while there is a inReplyTo field (taking a URI), not really a forum gateway. Sure a post can turn into a tweet or a toot or what have you, and the other direction could be finagled. But that is still not a forum. A forum would focus on the discussion, the topic, the thread, not the individual contributions of the participants.
Haven't seen if there is any meaningful discussion on what a forum gateway should be, how to manage it, and how to convince forum software makers to support this.
Vivaldi have had similar thoughts, with a bridge between Vivaldi users and their Mastodon server (https://social.vivaldi.net/start). Assuming you still have a Vivaldi account, you will also have another Mastodon user @vivaldi.net.
How in the world did you find that, heh.
It was on display.
Also, On Beasts and Bridges (https://jaxroam.medium.com/on-beasts-and-bridges-6141a0d3c5de)