Toot-sized summary:
Mastodon: cool
Integration with Vivaldi users: cooler
But you can go further (given time, desire and business case): two-way bridge between Mastodon and all your other content
Even further: POSSE-style publishing platform on vivaldi.net
Even further: Social networking repository supported by the browser itself
What do you mean by “social networking repository”? An archive of your timeline Mastodon timeline?
Quite literally a private copy of all your included social network activities (Mastodon as a starting point).
This was not practically possible before because social networks were unstructured web sites, owned by companies that wanted to exclude outside services built on top of them. But when (more or less) built on open standards, a browser would know what it is dealing with.
So yes, ultimately Vivaldi as a Mastodon+ client, directly and/or via extension.
Thus POSSE (“Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere“) concept, only taken further in a few directions.
1. Vivaldi.net can be an “Own Site” as a starting point. Publish there, replicate elsewhere (according to user-set rules, with reasonable easy defaults and UI). The (re)publishing is kept track of.
This will include unpublished entries (“entry” here refers to tweets and toots and posts and blogs and whatever else it around), what I call repository.
A scenario a local active collection and 1+ cloud-stored BLOBs for safety.
2. This can at later be moved back to the browser, either as a structured collection, like on Vivaldi.net or as an encrypted BLOB. The later mostly for privacy. Since Vivaldi doesn’t need to know if just used as a backup, can switch between the two.
3. Open protocol syncs browser/vivaldi.net. Now the user doesn’t depend on vivaldi.net and can “POSSE” somewhere else if wanted.
4. As mentioned “entries” need not be restricted to toots, I can come back to that.
But for now I have only talked about Vivaldi as a publishing platform, the read-write-web. This matters, but most do a whole lot more reading and connecting than they do creating.
This would be a point to take stock. You are already doing publishing on Vivaldi.net. So up until now, it would be doing the same things slightly differently.
The way we mostly use social networks is to consume and to connect. A user agent could improve on both. Followers and following are types of contacts, connections.
Likes, favourites, and reactions are forms of metadata, or bookmarks. Should you e.g. be able to search for entries that have made you angry? (search is constricted in Mastodon for social reasons, but searching your past is different).
5. However, what I went on about is a different tack. I am not merely interested in what I have written on social media, but the context in which it was written.
When I reply to someone, or if a non-spammer replies to me, I am interested in those entries, that should be in the repository as well. Not my entries so deletable read-only.
Cache concept matches well, this is part of my social cache. With URLs to live, versioned or archived versions.
Have you looked at Secure Scuttlebutt? https://scuttlebutt.nz/ It’s another alternative to Mastodon and Twitter. (It’s not interoperable with either, though.) Every user hosts their own repositories of what they’ve said as well as the people they follow. Users exchange repositories through “pub” servers. It might be something to try if you want to explore these ideas. Although, persistency might not be what you want from a social network.
This is what you get with a self-hosted Mastodon instance. You get your own copy of everything you share and everything anyone has ever shared with you. I’m not sure there’s a lot of value in duplicating that as a client-application. But, there might be a feature in an existing Mastodon client for all I know.
That’s the perspective of a site owner. For Vivaldi it isn’t much difference between client-side, web site, or cloud-like, if that is an available option.
But if you don’t trust twitter.com, facebook.com, or your Mastodon instance, would you trust Vivaldi.net to stay viable long term?
If you have a repository with at least one mirror, you are no longer dependent on your chosen Social Network Provider (hereafter SNP) to maintain your stuff responsibly.
(Also note it wouldn’t be a Mastodon site, but multiple SN accounts hosted by multiple SNPs.
Unless you are a media organisation, you probably won’t have dozens of accounts to maintain, but you probably will have at least a couple, and easily a handful. Type Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest to take three closed ones. Some would be Snapchat-ish fire&forget, others you’d hold on to for years or decades.)
Peace of mind, and ability to change SNP as easily as changing phone provider is nice, though hardly a killer app. But it is a good base to add new services on top.
(It might become a killer app in a manner of speaking. Competition is important. Lock-in to be avoided. If this can be shown to work, SNPs might be required by EU or equivalent to provide such an out )
