It was quite a pleasant feeling to see my article on “Is Social Media for Writers?” featured on Vivaldi’s choice of featured blog posts. The pleasant feeling was soon converted into surprise when I further noticed that both snapshots of my post and Vivaldi’s blog post on their social media site “Vivaldi Social” coexisted on the same web page. This confirmed the fact that unlike other social media sites like Facebook or Twitter etc, Vivaldi does encourage individual democratic opinion. My post would definitely have discouraged quite a few people from joining Mastodon or Vivaldi Social, but strangely the company chose to feature it without any qualms regarding the above mentioned matter. This clearly illustrates the fact that the company definitely welcomes all kinds of opinion including dissent. Perhaps it is this that is a cardinal element of Mastodon. Last evening I read somewhere that Mastodon had garnered 80 million subscribers within a short period of time. This is definitely a huge achievement. And although I am not a part of Mastodon or Vivaldi Social, I still take this opportunity to congratulate them both. This signals the liberation of social media from the clutches of media barons and corporations.

Thank you Vivaldi for encouraging and promoting democratic opinion. I look forward to more democratic dialogue on all virtual platforms in the future. Just like the real world outside needs more democracy, so does our lives online.