A Fediverse Alternative to TikTok
In the last few months i really gotten into the whole Fediverse thing, but i noticed that, despite it being the most popular Social Media Platform, there isn't a TikTok alternative. I know there is Loops, but it's not open source or federated yet, so it's not really an option. Why is that?
Loops is new and still in beta. The dev has said that he wants to wait to open source it until he feels it's current state is ready to be on other people's servers (once it reaches 1.0). I can't say I agree with the thought process but at least with pixelfed he did the same process and actually followed through on federation and open sourcing
The grant he's receiving to develop it requires it to be open source.
[TikTok is] the most popular Social Media Platform
I'm not calling you a liar, but this is news to me. Do you have any data to back up that assertion?
Correct. Seems more like 5th.
It's not true. Not even close.
It could vary by age group, so not most popular overall, but it's relative.
I've gone of the google play charts.
Nobody pays for that much bandwidth without the ability to manipulate you through profiling and impressions. You are the product. The product is not sharing videos. There is no fediverse platform that makes you its whore. If you were to make a video sharing platform, it would never work, because that is not the product, it's only a feature of what makes up the dopamine machine.
Lemmy will also never outgrow commercial platforms, because the commercial platforms also never were about content.
Nobody pays for that much bandwidth without the ability to manipulate you through profiling and impressions. You are the product. The product is not sharing videos. There is no fediverse platform that makes you its whore. If you were to make a video sharing platform, it would never work, because that is not the product, it's only a feature of what makes up the dopamine machine.
I mean, video streaming platforms already exist as part of the fediverse (Peertube) so i would disagree on you with you on that one.
That's a good point, and I don't really have enough insights to properly respond to that. I did think about Peertube, and I believe that a site like TikTok is different, because it relies on the ability to broadcast a large number of short videos, specifically with lots of skips.
Streaming one video for several minutes, and skipping between numerous videos every couple of seconds, is orders of magnitude more expensive. Video compression works on the idea that you store entire pictures rarely, and then just encode the difference between each frame. When you constantly need the start of videos, you constantly need the full picture of the first frame. This induces a much higher bandwidth requirement than with video that streams for several minutes continuously. Also consider the response time that is required to make the TikTok experience work. Then also consider that you need to attract enough content contributors to make this work. You can't just upload some ancient archive of 45 minute videos. You need to drive the machine.
So, to produce a TikTok experience, you also need to design for an attractive ingress of free content.
This is just not replicable in a free environment.
Video content is really computationally expensive to play and store. Seems like it requires centralization to make the service fast and responsive with enough storage.
I suppose I could imagine some kind of ephemeral TikTok that deletes videos from storage after a set amount of time. Or a lowfi TikTok that only allows uploads in 240p. Otherwise I just can't see it.
7 second clips
So, Vine?
Lowfi TicToc would be perfect. Just upload the thousands of loops from Z0R or POWN.IT and wait.
A peertube approach would be a great way of saving bandwidth
It's still in the early days of development and you will probably have to wait a bit for full AP implementation.
Vidzy and the loops server code are available under AGPL. The loops app isn't open source yet, but has to be eventually as part of the NLnet grant agreement.
Most of the content on TikTok is created by people because they want to earn money with it. But most of it isn't content which would make it possible to build up a supporter base through Patreon, OnlyFans etc. So where is the money going to come from to attract such content creators to a potential Fediverse TikTok alternative?
I mean independent sponsorships still exist, and for most creators, that's the biggest source of income anyway.
On TikTok? I doubt that. Do you have any examples?
I really doubt that average TikTok (or instagram, or youtube) aims at monetizing video. It's a way to share photo and video more than a way to make money. but I may be wrong.
I'm fascinated by this idea that the fediverse is open source by definition, when I don't think that's implied anywhere. It's notpart of the ActivityPub license, is it? I would have assumed thatw as public domain.
because the team building it are better at marketing what they want it to do rather than what it actually does.
doesnt federate. doesnt embed. requires their app or view only in their walled garden. so far its just yet-another-short-form-video-site
That's exactly what I'm worried about.