Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok

https://joinloops.org/

by Gooblebrai • 5 months ago

575 356 5 months ago

joinloops.org

deafpolygon• 5 months ago

We do not need another tiktok.

brody_hamer• 5 months ago

Censorship.

sheiyei• 5 months ago

No, health advocacy (societal and mental). Better formats exist

slipheen• 5 months ago

I didn't deep dive into this, but just for context and comparison, here are some other tools which are building TikTok like tools on Bluesky-

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/01/here-are-the-apps-battling...

Almondsetat2• 5 months ago

"Open-source TikTok" is like reading "open source slot machine". Not something you should be proud of, no matter how much you sugarcoat it with "All the fun of short-form video, none of the corporate control"

avidruntime• 5 months ago

Short form content is a medium that isn't going away. Short form content is not inherently harmful, although short form content replacing or displacing other important mediums arguably is. When I think about the issues stemming from short form content, I don't think about the inherent medium, I think about the providers and their capabilities to use the sum of all consumed content by a user in the name of a ulterior motive at scale. While I haven't investigated it too deeply, Loops seems to be an effort in patching that. Is your objection in the marketing language or in the inherent technology?

Almondsetat2• 5 months ago

Short form user generated content being served in our faces in a constant and ever updating feed fucks up our brains. It does not matter if it's proprietary or FOSS or non profit.

Is your objection in the marketing language or in the inherent technology?

I think saying it's like an open source slot machine is pretty much self-explanatory

HelloUsername• 5 months ago

Recently released on the Appstore https://blog.joinloops.org/loops-is-now-on-the-app-store/

weezing• 5 months ago

This form of content is bad regardless of platform.

CharlesW3• 5 months ago

The problem with TikTok isn't the form, which is effectively StumbleUpon for short-form video (or Dave Winer's "river of news" in video form, if you prefer).

There's brainrot content on all platforms, but there's also ArtTok, BookTok, CraftTok, EduTok, FoodTok, GardenTok, HistoryTok, MathTok, MusicTok, PoliTok, ScienceTok, TechTok, and lots more.

Avicebron2• 5 months ago

I'm pretty sure BookTok is just porn for women who really like the plot of 50 shades of grey..

edit: which is to say I'm not positive the format isn't the problem.

ajam1507• 5 months ago

Short form video is the brainrot.

wolvoleo5• 5 months ago

The problem I find with it is that it's such a monoculture. Everyone is copying everyone else.

As an example: there's this stupid skit going around. Someone asks a waiter "Could I ask you about the menu please?". The waiter comes really close and goes like "The men I please is none of your business".

It's an ok joke but I've seen literally 20 different people doing the same skit in the last two weeks and it gets so damn annoying. And it's not just this one. There's always one that is viral and everyone copies it.

Zak• 5 months ago

Here's a study showing an immediate negative impact on prospective memory from switching context repeatedly on short-form video platforms: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...

Unlimited skipping until a video is sufficiently stimulating had a negative impact regardless of the content, while people limited to ten skips in ten minutes did not experience a negative impact. This suggests that the format itself has harmful cognitive effects.

pizza• 5 months ago

Why?

sodapopcan4• 5 months ago

I feel justified turning this around on you and asking what is good about it? It's disposable media. In and out of brain in seconds. There are any number of better ways to waste time let alone ones that don't show you ads.

flawn• 5 months ago

https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-litera...

This is a great writeup on why short-form content is overall a net negative for us with a human brain.

WD-423• 5 months ago

This. If people are looking for freedom, the thing to do is to stop using TikTok or anything like it, not to make a federated version of it.

amelius2• 5 months ago

A federated version could provide a path away from addictive and polarizing content, and endless viewing.

hnthrowaway0315• 5 months ago

This. It is just mental drug.

cagenut• 5 months ago

so is love

this level of reductive thought termination goes nowhere

runako• 5 months ago

I'll come at it from another angle. Some of the most popular podcasts (and YouTubers) produce hours of long-form video (an acceptable format) daily. Without naming names, some of those convey less information in 2-3 hours of video than some short form creators do in 2-3 minutes.

The medium influences the message, but the channel still matters.

(And some messengers, especially public intellectuals, are not doing the long form video/audio at all. One prominent TikTok poster has a $$$$$ job as a public intellectual and outside of short form, the other options to consume his content involve $$$ subscriptions or $$$$ in-person events. I'll take his 5-minute videos over those alternatives.)

Separately, I am chuckling at people saying TikTok is "all X" or "nothing but Y" or "overrun with Z." Do people still not know that statements like these are confessions?

hombre_fatal• 5 months ago

Without naming names, some of those convey less information in 2-3 hours of video than some short form creators do in 2-3 minutes.

Even if you have a 3-minute video that yammers off back-to-back facts to maximize info density, it's still low value because you've only spent 3 minutes with those facts.

There's nothing a 3-minute video can do to compete with a good video 2-3 hour video due to the limitations of the medium.

I would wager a 2-3 hour video of something you find worthless, like celebrity gossip, is preferable to the same thing in TikTok form because at least the longer video challenged you with following a narrative of some length.

When you fill your time with TikTok videos, you're basically regressing to the mental activation normally relegated to babies and toddlers. I think it's fair to demand a little more aspiration of ourselves.

ahartmetz• 5 months ago

This seems like (probably) harm reduction, the approach to dealing with drug addiction. It's not great, but better than at least some alternatives.

micromacrofoot• 5 months ago

Sure but there are like 5 layers of bad with tiktok, this undoes at least 2-3 of them

notepad0x902• 5 months ago

Alcohol is bad, regardless of the spirit you consume. Look at how prohibition worked out.

It also shouldn't matter that it's bad, the only restriction should be for minors. Adults should be able to willfully enter addictive cycles.

There are people that spend all their day gaming, watching twitch, scrolling on facebook, instagram. it isn't anyone's place to pick and choose which ones are acceptable and which ones aren't. society is already a sickening dystopian nanny system.

hackable_sand• 5 months ago

Everyone keeps saying this

But no one will say why

throwa356262• 5 months ago

Congrats. All that remains now is spending $$$ on some D-level celebs to lure in the users...

Aeroi• 5 months ago

two hardest problems for a platform like this.

1. users and initial flywheel. 2. content moderation.

ftchd2• 5 months ago

I want this to be succesful so much, but almost nothing works in the mobile app

Needed 2 tries to sign up, and uploading a video from the camera roll failed (5-7 tries)

nagaiaida• 5 months ago

yeah, there's a consistent pattern of overpromising across this and other projects by the same person

throawayonthe2• 5 months ago

how good is the For You feed? the tiktok secret sauce is the creepy algorithm, who's clamoring for "crack but not addictive?"

binary132• 5 months ago

It sounds like you’re suggesting federated crack…

throawayonthe2• 5 months ago

is it really a tiktok alternative if there's no crack?

verdverm5• 5 months ago

locally sourced, organic, ethical

[south park clip] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyOzp9pR6iE

SilverElfin• 5 months ago

There have already been some TikTok alternatives that have become popular after it got bought by the Trump / Oracle / Silver Lake group of buyers.

One alternative I’ve heard of that apparently became popular is Skylight: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/26/tiktok-alternative-skyligh...

gempir• 5 months ago

Good that they have a web version.

But the most basic functionality of going to the next video is only available via scroll (no keyboard arrow down?) and it has a really long animation and delay?

Just feels awful to use.

I feel if you wanna win in this space, especially with people who prefer more "free" platforms, then the non-app version should be a bigger priority IMO.

wolvoleo5• 5 months ago

I like the app but it really needs a mute function (ideally an option by default).

TensorToad• 5 months ago

This is actually pretty exciting. Excited to see how this turns out. But I am wondering how to keep it financially possible to operate the platform. Also, 95+% of the users probably don't care that much about censorship and privacy enough to switch platform.

zahlman• 5 months ago

I would have thought that the point of federation is not to require centralized servers that cost a lot to operate.

But sure, something like this probably requires a fundamentally different revenue model. Maybe even the one where people donate to server operators.

Barrin92• 5 months ago

centralized servers cost less to operate, that why data intensive applications centralize over time. That's division of labor. The higher the complexity the the higher degree of specialization. And a video service is very demanding.

And you need to solve the economics first because otherwise your decentralized service is simply going to centralize over time to deal with demands for a more reliable and higher quality service. (and how to compensate creators)

cogman10• 5 months ago

It's interesting, I doubt it'll ever be successful.

Look, the reason a lot of content makes it's way to Youtube, tiktok, and twitter, etc is because the creators can earn money from the platform. On youtube and tiktok, you can send gifts to your favorite creator. That incentivizes creators to create content.

loops will never have that feature. It's really hard to legally distribute money like that. But further, the decentralized nature of it means that you'll never know if your funds ends up in your creator's account or the instant account.

Without any sort of path to make money, the only content on the platform will be works of passion. Maybe that's a good thing, but it means these people will ultimately burn out.

But on the plus side, it means you probably won't end up with an endless stream of AI slop.

wolvoleo5• 5 months ago

Instagram pays hardly anything. I don't know anyone doing it for that reason. It's more advertising for their other services. Like onlyfans, selling physical stuff, lectures, events etc.

And of course the people who do it for fun, usually the best content. It doesn't matter they'll eventually stop. There's always new ones.

I'm not sure about tiktok, but I doubt they pay much more than insta.

jmyeet• 5 months ago

For 20+ years World of Warcraft has dominated the MMORPG genre. There have been a host of challengers and they've all miserably failed. In fact, there have only been a handful of successes (eg UO, EQ, FF14).

And what do almost all of these challengers have in common? Some version of "the PvP is going to be amazing". Why do these companies like PVP? Because it's essentially user-generated content. It increases time spent in game without having to create content, which is expensive.

Thing is, players of this genre don't want PVP. Even in WoW, I'd be surprised if 10% of the playerbase actively engages in PVP activity. So, by focusing on PVP, you're actually cut your potential market by 90%. Before you've written a single line of code or created any artwork. Put another way, you're spending valuable development effort on features only a tiny minority of players care about or even want.

I'm reminded of this whenever somebody on HN talks about federation. The only people who care about federation are... other people on HN. It does literally nothing for users. It greatly complicates the implementation. The last successes of federation are POTS and Email. It's quite literally never succeeded since. And the problems with federation that POTS and Email continue to have to this day should be an object lesson in why it's a bad idea.

Choosing federation from the start is choosing to lose. I'm sorry but it's true.

rrr_oh_man• 5 months ago

This didn’t go where I thought it would. You made me chuckle. Thanks!

fsflover2• 5 months ago

The only people who care about federation are... other people on HN. It does literally nothing for users.

Until enshittification happens. Example: the fall of Freenode.

eddythompson80• 5 months ago

completely agree. Every time I see a "fediverse" on a project, I know its not going anywhere.

pjc507• 5 months ago

Great analogy, especially considering the extent to which people play social media (especially Twitter, and derivatives) as a PvP game. Which has the "Trammel problem", from Ultima Online: nobody wants to be on the losing side.

dangoodmanUT• 5 months ago

I can appreciate the effort, but the UI is indistinguishable from tiktok.

blueboo• 5 months ago

Open source meth is still bad in absolute terms even if it’s better than the alternative meth

evolve2k• 5 months ago

Great to see this progressing. Tried it out just now after last testing it over 6 months ago.

I’d say the main “feature” id want to see added is a mandatory field on upload to tick if it’s AI content. Then a tag on videos that are Ai and at the account level to filter out AI content.

Otherwise it’s going to be a slops fest.

bigfishrunning3• 5 months ago

What is the incentive for people producing AI slop to tick the "This is slop" box? Reminds me of the evil bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit

gnarlouse• 5 months ago

"Everything you love about short-video"

haha

b00ty4breakfast• 5 months ago

this is like using an "ethically produced" brick to smash your foot with; The method of manufacturing the brick isn't the problem.

These formats are designed for a specific purpose; maximizing engagement to extract value.

so we've remove the incentive to extract value but we leave the predatory design that maximize engagement? You working in a different milieu but you are bringing the worst parts of the previous milieu along for the ride.

Please, anybody working on this kind of alternative social platform, we need to rethink how we interact online; decentralization leaves the worst parts of modern social media completely unaddressed.

blackcatsec• 5 months ago

One of the unspoken parts of the open source social media movement is to put the 'social' back in the 'social media'. There has been a fine line between true user-driven content and centrally-controlled (and often authoritarian-lite) algorithms; with major players (advertisers, oligarchs, governments) putting their thumb on the latter half to ensure that everyone stays isolated, divided, and pacified.

Everything you called out is a symptom of that control: engagement baiting, algorithmic manipulation, censorship and suppression. Absent these items, social media can be an incredible force for good and a hopeful longer term future of more peace.

akdev1l• 5 months ago

The incentive is still there.

If there is an algorithm putting stuff on people’s faces then there will always be an incentive imo.

bee_rider2• 5 months ago

On one hand, it seems impossible to supplant with Tik Tok without the engagement bait. On the other, replacing the additive sites with something just as addictive seems pointless. It is a tricky puzzle.

bastawhiz• 5 months ago

The unfortunate truth is that TikTok is just a dopamine hit machine. There's no puzzle here, this project is just "we built an open source slot machine that you can install in your own home". Replacing the casino is addressing a pointless problem.

ageedizzle• 5 months ago

It's not necessarily the case that Loops is just as addictive as TikTok. Because TikTok is more than just short term videos. It's also a recommendation algorithm that slurps up as much information as it can about you to predict what you'll want to watch next. This recommendation algorithm plays a big role in making TikTok addictive. And as far as I'm aware, Loops does not have this functionality. It will just show you videos based on a much simpler algorithm that takes into account how recent a video is and how many likes/comments it has, or something like that, which will make it less addictive.

user3939382• 5 months ago

I’ve started wondering if I want a smartphone at all lately. The whole paradigm gets creepier by the day and the global corporate expectation you have one makes me not want it.

spaqin• 5 months ago

There's nothing tricky about this - the only winning move is not to play.

gerdesj• 5 months ago

"we need to rethink how we interact online"

I don't have a TikTok account, never have and I doubt I ever will. Am I missing anything?

I gave up fags (cigarettes) around eight years ago. Would you like some ideas for coping and abstention strategies?

orhmeh09• 5 months ago

I enjoy watching TikTok, especially local or niche creators who have just a couple hundred followers. This is not going to be a problem as you imagine.

burnt-resistor• 5 months ago

Yep. Anything similar to what was Vine (i.e., TikTok, Youtube Shorts, Instagram Reels; e.g., very short videos with infinite scrolling) is ultimately too consuming literally a drug that robs one of the ability to concentrate and patience.

I think we need to encourage long form videos from 5 minutes to 1-2 hours and organize stuff around metadata (title, keywords/tags, lists, unique identifier) to mesh with a living, standardized ontology in a curated, sensible fashion that disallows proliferation of slop, too low quality stuff, and spam. From there, choose your own recommender and related algorithms/plugins.

The big gotcha of decentralized video platforms is content distribution that doesn't hug a self-hoster's server with barely any traffic.

muppetman• 5 months ago

Well said, thank you.

AuthAuth6• 5 months ago

I do not know how to phrase this politely. I like the platform and the concept is interesting. But the people on it are just so far away from what me (and men my age) deem interesting and seem to be hostile to anything that doesnt fit their very restrictive ideals.

You'll never find sports, guns, cars, comedy and a lot of other mainstream content on these platforms even though there is nothing inherently offensive about it. I havent used Loops but im assuming its the same crowd as on Mastodon.

krapp• 5 months ago

You'll never find sports, guns, cars, comedy and a lot of other mainstream content on these platforms even though there is nothing inherently offensive about it.

I'm pretty sure you can find all of those things on TikTok and Youtube Shorts. If you're talking about federated platforms, probably all of it but guns. And if you can't of course no one is stopping you from starting a channel or instance yourself.

AuthAuth6• 5 months ago

I posted a cool clip from the UFC and got banned even though the content had a warning. It wasnt even that violent just a clean headkick ko.

If I started an instance it would get defederated because people would take one look and assume its toxic. But its not, Im not, I've spend years in the leftie techie activist spaces and cause no issues.

GaryBluto2• 5 months ago

While I'm not interested in "short form" videos I had the same curiosity regarding the userbase and wanted to check myself.

The only way to look at the web view is to sign up, so I did. I completed E-Mail verification, then the account was disabled immediately with a pop up message to contact support. Not worth the effort.

riidom• 5 months ago

I just tried exactly the same (at https://loops.video ), but I was able to watch without account, and registering afterwards also worked. Guess it's something on your side.

deadbabe• 5 months ago

Disgusting.

root_axis2• 5 months ago

You'll never find sports, guns, cars, comedy and a lot of other mainstream content on these platforms even though there is nothing inherently offensive about it.

What are you talking about? Sports, cars, and comedy are present everywhere on the internet. Guns are more of a niche and not without controversy, and it's certainly true that the incumbent networks place restrictions on some gun related content.

AuthAuth6• 5 months ago

I know they're everywhere on the internet. I'm specifically talking about loops/mastodon. I want loops/mastodon to be a diverse place that has content from all over the internet.

wizzwizz42• 5 months ago

I have no interest in guns, and only a minor interest in sports and cars; but if you set up an instance devoted to these, and got your friends to use it (just to talk to each other), I reckon it would only be a few months before you'd seeded a community. (There is plenty of comedy on the Fediverse, so I think that's a bad example.)

The design of the Fediverse is receptive to niche communities. If other communities are hostile, you can just pretend they don't exist, and the things they post won't appear on your timelines. "The people on it" is not as much of a thing as you might be used to from social media like Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, or HN. (As everyone's so very fond or saying, ActivityPub is like email.)

If your niche is a popular niche (which sports most certainly are), then it should get quite big, quite quickly, provided the people who'd participate in it are (or can be) present.

AuthAuth6• 5 months ago

I disagree because you dont just want "twitter for MMA" you want the whole network. So you want to be a good citizen and have instances federate with you. But most wont because of the nature of the content. So users would prefer platforms where they can follow all content from a single account.

ear7h• 5 months ago

This identity politics/virtue signaling seems off topic.

I havent used Loops

I think the worst repercussion of consuming short form content is that it gives the _consumer_ a false sense of engagement. That their passive consumption endows them with knowledge and credibility, leading to the deluded belief that a display of disintirest such as this one is 1) appropriate and 2) a profound condemnation rather than the petty, irrelevant whine that it is.

dana321• 5 months ago

I signed up and had a look, its full of garbage

umrashrf• 5 months ago

How is it decentralized? Decentralized as in bitcoin?

atomicfiredoll6• 5 months ago

Decentralized as in not needing a central server.

I don't know about Loops specifically, but generally [Fediverse][0] projects tend to:

- Not rely on a central server.

- Allow you to set up your own server.

- Connect to a web of other servers through the Activity Pub protocol.

- Allow you to modify policies on your server (including restricting which other servers information is shared with.)

Many are also open source.

The creator of Loops also built a different project called [Pixelfed](1) with a focus on decentralized photo sharing (although it can also host video.) Because all these projects speak the same protocol, it's possible that at some point, Loops could show content from Pixelfed. Apparently Loops content is already appearing in Mastodon.

Meta's Threads also has Activity Pub support. Hypothetically, Threads content could appear on Loops and vice versa, if the UI is built to accommodate that style of content and a server admin doesn't block the Threads server (many servers block Threads specifically.)

TL;DR: A web of servers using different pieces of open source software to share social media, without a centralized server.

- [0] https://fediverse.info/

- [1] https://pixelfed.org/

atomicfiredoll6• 5 months ago

Just a side note, reading through some of the other comments, it sounds like Loops specifically isn't currently open source and the intent is to open source it at some later date.

mschuster91• 5 months ago

Oh dear god, another fediverse service.

I mean, I love the idea behind the fediverse, but the problem is, as long as you got federated instances of anything, instance admins will use their userbase for petty bxtchfights and purity contests.

and no, selfhosting is not an alternative, anything Fediverse requires a lot of resources, is ripe with exploits and exposes you to significant legal risk from griefers (e.g. you get DM'd CSAM by someone, your server automatically downloads it => congratulations, you are now a pedo under at least German law).

iamnothere• 5 months ago

Glad to see more platforms on the Fediverse. Couldn’t be less interested in this particular one since it’s short form video. Those who like this medium: enjoy.

I may find short form video distasteful, but it’s less distasteful than those who want to dictate the media formats that others consume. Get a grip, people.

hmokiguess• 5 months ago

Aw man can we not flip the script and maybe build less of these things? It’s saturated and not really helping society but rather creating more addiction machines.

Bayko• 5 months ago

Based on what I have seen, read and experienced, a tech doesn't just go away. It evolves (unless you know one company was building it and then got shut down). Social media in the current form if it went away, would get replaced with something even worse.

notpushkin4• 5 months ago

From what I’ve heard, people burned out on TikTok are switching to more mindful alternatives. Perhaps what Loops could do is try to capture those people as well?

DANmode• 5 months ago

They’re addiction machines because of how they’re built.

See: custom Facebook apps that only show the part of the service you ask for - not force-feeding you whatever they want.

muyuu• 5 months ago

the brainrot from tiktok amplified with the brainrot from mastodon, what's not to love?

aembleton3• 5 months ago

Lack of content

notepad0x902• 5 months ago

Each instance admin has full control over their server's moderation policies, allowed content, and federation choices. Loops provides the tools; communities set their own rules.

Yeah, but how do you maintain quality? Are users expected to shun instances that have poor quality? Quality doesn't just mean spam and unwanted content, it means hiding poor quality posts in feeds. You end up with users that are willing to invest time in curating the app to meet their needs. But that means you miss out on most people out there who expect a curated and engaging (read:addicting) experience.

I am not concerned about market shares on their own. But this is a good idea, and tiktok and youtube short videos are doing lots of harm to the world. Having a viable alternative would be amazing.

I'll suggest that a very strong and well funded "main" instance server exist? I'm sure there is one now, but I'm concerned this will go the way of lemmy and mastodon.

I would much rather prefer a centralized social media with a sanely constructed governance and corporate structure and a clear and non-conflicting revenue generation plan. The guardian's incorporation structure is what I consider a good example. That news organization is managing to be fairly independent, prevalent and significant when all others are caving to walled gardens and billionaires. social media in general should be viewed similar to journalistic organizations in terms of governance structure.

it is nice to be able to take your data elsewhere, it is nicer not having the need to begin with. In principle that sounds great, but in practice it is similar to forking software if you don't like it.

Lastly, how do they plan on making money? At least to the level that sustains their operations?

bobbane• 5 months ago

LOOPS, on the other hand, is an object-oriented programming environment in Interlisp-D, and one of the predecessors to CLOS.

replwoacause• 5 months ago

Let me also register my disinterest in another platform that mimics TikTok.

Brainrot is brainrot regardless of whether it's "federated and open-source" or not. And BTW, 95% of the people on TikTok don't care about either of those two things.

nanobuilds• 5 months ago

The UX should be more "mass user" friendly if the goal is to attract mainstream users. Sign in with Apple/etc.. selecting a server is technical language and not end-user language etc.

deminature• 5 months ago

Selecting a server is one of the reasons the fediverse appears to have not seriously challenged incumbents. As soon as a non-technical user sees this, they bounce.

8organicbits2• 5 months ago

Checking the Mastodon app, new users are asked to "Join mastodon.social" or "pick another server". If you just mindlessly click the primary button, you'll get an account on mastodon.social so I think the server selection challenge has largely been addressed.

Gigachad2• 5 months ago

There's also the problem where selecting the server is quite a consequential choice which users who are brand new have no way to make a proper choice on. The owner of the server you choose has access to all of your data and the ability to delete your account or shut down the server at any time.

nine_k2• 5 months ago

A sensible default should be preselected. E.g. the geographically closest, not overloaded server.

verdverm5• 5 months ago

Technical users like myself bounce too. It's why I build and play in the ATProto ecosystem ("the atmosphere")

dewey4• 5 months ago

I think this got much better than on the early days. Nowadays it's not much different than picking your Discord server, which is already something everyone is aware of.

soared• 5 months ago

Also why not have the homepage be a feed, let me scroll for a bit before forcing me to sign up

HugoTea3• 5 months ago

You can, but you need to be on an instance, go to https://loops.video for that experience. joinloops.org is more of an onboarding site it seems

HugoTea3• 5 months ago

This is the same philosophy as the creator, the sign-up flow does not ask you to select a server it defaults you to loops.video Maybe the app is different? I haven't tried it yet

mortsnort• 5 months ago

The reality is that the addictive algorithm of commercial social media platforms is the product.

These alternative platforms are like nicotine free cigarettes.

They might garner small communities, which is totally cool and valid, but they will never slay the giants.

Morromist• 5 months ago

Old-school social media can be addictive too. I don't use any social media where complex algorithms decide what I see, but I have trouble wasting far too much time on discord.

nine_k2• 5 months ago

Discord is communication with fellow humans. Tiktok is one-way consumption mostly. Discord is mostly text. Tiktok is mostly speech-free momentary videos, adjusting to the minute hints in your reaction.

There's no comparison.

brutal_chaos_• 5 months ago

To be fair, you don't need to slay giants to be a viable product.

echelon5• 5 months ago

"nicotine free cigarettes" are a product too.

We have limited time on earth, so many tend to evaluate things on how big of an impact they make or how large of a demand they satisfy.

It's okay if not everything is big, but it's also okay for people to use scale as a criteria for sizing things up.

rustyhancock• 5 months ago

As is the incessant stream. If there is a pause at all in the next video loading the addicted user can break free.

One of the issues with federated anything is that there will be good servers and bad servers.

Good servers get hammered, and if you're popular you might end up perversely paying for people to watch your videos having to fund your server to maintain its performance.

This happened with mastadon, matrix and will be far worse if they want to deliver tiktoks insane performance.

echelon5• 5 months ago

Birth rates took a dip with broadband, smartphones, and TikTok.

Dopamine and attention sinks are pulling society in directions counter to evolutionary programming. Our runtime algorithms optimize for different things.

No value judgment, but it's interesting. I haven't had kids (yet?), and I feel the internet (and the career that revolves around it) is the biggest reason why.

skirge• 5 months ago

happiness is addictive. Solution is to replace with something completely different. Why not free hacking challenges / courses for teenagers?

socalgal2• 5 months ago

Social media is its own problem . It’s got nothing to do with the algorithms and everything to do with being able to trivially broadcast to the entire planet.

Even with no algo the people posting want maximum exposure and have every incentive to try to get it.

mghackerlady2• 5 months ago

I wonder if it'd be possible for the host to use custom algorithms, that way you can have instances with very limited recommendation systems or ones with something more tiktok-like

yeukhon• 5 months ago

Good luck, projects like these either end up getting sued or going to acquisition. Open source != morally on the end result

with• 5 months ago

Ew. The content problem on TikTok was never the protocol, it's that 99% of short-form video is brainrot slop regardless of who hosts the servers. Slapping ActivityPub on it literally solves nothing for humanity.

verdverm5• 5 months ago

I'm hopeful that the decoupling of algorithms (feeds) in ATProto can change this equation. For the tiktok clones and all the other apps.

aembleton3• 5 months ago

If TikTok was decentralised then the instance that you are a member of could de-prioritise videos from those instances that were allowing the brainrot slop.

beloch2• 5 months ago

One thing that's awesome about this and is 100% better than TikTok:

No burned-in branding. No trailing brand screen. No trademark brand noises.

----

Tiktok videos have omnipresent logos burned-in and a full-screen trailer with an annoying Tiktok brand sound. The few random loops that I looked at had none of these. I hope this doesn't change and, if it doesn't change, I hope loops displaces TikTok. I despise being constantly bombarded with branding.

notpushkin4• 5 months ago

Bombarding with branding is how TikTok got people on, and I don’t think it’s a bad strategy per se. In fact, I can’t think of any other way to overcome network effects with a product like this (word of mouth would be the best, but you’ll need a ton of creators first).

beloch2• 5 months ago

Vandalizing every video posted on their service may have helped TikTok spread brand recognition. One can only hope that a service that doesn't vandalize the content they deliver will find a way to pull ahead.

atlgator• 5 months ago

The HN cycle for federated alternatives is now complete: email → chat → microblogging → short video. We're speedrunning the "open-source version of things we claim to hate" timeline. Can't wait for the federated, self-hosted casino.

dvngnt_• 5 months ago

Is that not crypto?

jazzyjackson• 5 months ago

I always thought a casino might make more sense if it was run as a cooperative where members were also shareholders, so you could have fun gambling but your money came back to you eventually

Gigachad2• 5 months ago

Isn't this somewhat like how these new crypto prediction markets work? There is no house taking a cut, all of the winnings get paid out.

wmeredith• 5 months ago

That's what a friendly neighborhood poker game is. There is no house take. I am not a lawyer, but have been given the distinct impression by one that in US jurisdictions the house take is what makes gambling go from entertainment amongst friends to illegal racket.

TiredOfLife• 5 months ago

It's not "things we hate". It's "things we didn't think of capitalizing on".

grougnax• 5 months ago

When self-host OnlyFans?

zaik• 5 months ago

federated, self-hosted casino

Good news: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

arealaccount• 5 months ago

Federated tattoo parlors

niam2• 5 months ago

I have no horse in the short-form video race, but I recognize that it has material affects on the world (whether I'd like it or not). Scorn for the principle of an open platform here seems misplaced. It seems too young of a format with too few examples to confidently say it's irredeemable.

spaceman_2020• 5 months ago

HN is generally the place you come to to hate anything new in tech. No new piece of tech released in is ever liked here. Everyone nitpicks, strawmans, and complains that the v1 of the product is not perfect. It’s honestly so tiresome

colechristensen• 5 months ago

Unhelpful nitpicks and people complaining about them get downvotes.

At this time the top comment on this post is complaining about the rest of the comments. This is not how things should be around here.

willis9362• 5 months ago

What if we could say with some certainty that the format makes people stupid?

https://youtu.be/tdIUMkXxtHg

niam2• 5 months ago

We don't have many examples of short form video feeds which are divorced from the the TikTok and Reels algorithm -- both of which are aggressively incented to "engage" a user in ways they may not have preferred in the retrospect.

b8• 5 months ago

Problem will be growing the user base. YouTube Shorts will be a big competitor.

boriskourt4• 5 months ago

How is this a problem in your opinion?

ParadisoShlee2• 5 months ago

This project would love some additional support. If you're a developer who is interested in building this... please get in touch with them, the team is VERY small so you can do some good by just supporting them.

verdverm5• 5 months ago

Saw this comment about developer hostility first, is there a response or critique out there?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47118328

flexagoon• 5 months ago

No disrespect to the project, but it is a bit hard to find motivation to contribute to something that will most likely end up being used by like 100 people who'll all just post videos about how they're better than Tiktok users

fsflover2• 5 months ago

This looks like a shallow dismissal to me.

lai0602• 5 months ago

The platform is filled with so many AI generated slop

CqtGLRGcukpy2• 5 months ago

It's worth keeping in mind that Loops is made by dansup which has also made and runs Pixelfed, FediDB, and has a history of being hostile to developers.

You can see the recounting of his hostility at https://dansup-open-letter.github.io/appendix/

(I'm not a signature of the open letter)

Kovah• 5 months ago

Unfortunately, I can second this, both as a developer and a user. His IMHO childish behavior has ruined his image for me, and is not a good lighthouse for the Fediverse itself. Also, as a OSS veteran myself, I see it extremely critical that he is starting new projects all along, denies to get proper help and build up a maintainer team, and leaves older projects in the dust. Pixelfed is the one product he might should focus on, jet it feels like the platform is in maintenance only mode. Pixelfed is a wonderful addition to the Fediverse and deserves to be on good hands.

Maybe, and this is a very personal opinion, his product success and the Kickstarter campaign raising over 100k made him feel like he's better than everybody else. And one can see the effects.

boriskourt4• 5 months ago

This comes up here and there to discredit the developer but having followed all the drama for many years now I just want to add that Dansup has apologized multiple times, and has been far more open about his process. His communication has also changed for the better over the last two years especially. Its not easy being human, and I think its a good sign to see that he takes this seriously.

vyr2• 5 months ago

yeah he has a long history of saying dumb shit in public and then trying to cover his tracks.

also, having had to figure out some of the Pixelfed code for previous projects, i wonder if he's up to the task of maintaining any of this once the next shiny thing comes along. Fedi software has a lot of quirks in general (comes with the nearly nonexistent budgets) but as a representative issue, the dude managed to build a photo blogging service with no way to export or back up your photos and that hasn't been fixed in seven years.

ultimately, though, if we ignore software quality and developer reputation, Loops is going to live or die based on whether anyone on Fedi actually wants to make short-form video. given existing Fedi culture, plus how expensive it can be to produce and how the RoI is basically zero, i don't think we're going to see much native to Fedi. some might get crossposted by TikTok/Shorts/Reels creators that want a backup location that won't get erased the second someone makes a spurious copyright claim, but i suspect we're just going to see a few months of stolen TikToks and then not much after that.

prmoustache• 5 months ago

the thing is anyone can already host short-form videos on many other fediverse/activitypub apps like Mastodon.

Same for image, I never really understood the point of pixelfed as other fediverse/activitypub apps can already host pictures.

creamyhorror• 5 months ago

given existing Fedi culture, plus how expensive it can be to produce and how the RoI is basically zero, i don't think we're going to see much native to Fedi.

Yeah, actual adoption will require getting the actual people to come onboard who want to entertain/influence others, plus the viewers (two-sided market problem). When weighing that against network effects of the big players, the chances look a little slim.

Probably need another more low-effort or attractive angle to grow the Fediverse, tbh.

RamblingCTO• 5 months ago

And this needless drama is relevant why? Can we keep that on the fediverse please?

ParadisoShlee2• 5 months ago

Quick question: even if this is/was true, do you think isolating him is the correct response? or maybe engaging and taking some of the pressure off him might actually help.

People love to bully people who slip up... dudes a hot mess but I think he needs community more than being openly attacked.

CqtGLRGcukpy2• 5 months ago

In my honest opinion, I think the correct response is to stop using anything that dansup makes until he realizes he has to give up some of the control, or the project stops being developed.

While it's nice if people want to help take some pressure off, it only works if the main developer (dansup in this case) is willing to accept that help. And based off the link I gave, and some of the comments here, it doesn't look like dansup is willing to accept help.

system2• 5 months ago

The TikTok users are not conscious humans to think like "oh, this app is bad for me, let me find a clean alternative". Nice try, but missed the target by a mile.

bloody-crow• 5 months ago

Who actually wants this? Kids obsesses with TikTok don't care about federated/open source bits. People who do are not on TikTok or interested in this type of brainrot in the first place.

What am I missing?

brikym2• 5 months ago

Maybe it could be what prescribed Methadone is to Heroin addicts.

intothemild• 5 months ago

Watching all these open source, federated versions of social media platforms is like if you found out your favourite drug was actually manufactured by some really bad people and made people around the world suffer. So you make an open source version of the drug. Similar formula, just this time the people can own it.

Sure you cut out the bad people, but is the situation improved now?

MilanTodorovic• 5 months ago

I don't think that's a good analogy. You can't "hospitalize" someone into Loops for rehabilitation. Don't fight the symptoms, fight the cause.

raincole2• 5 months ago

Heroin is illegal, so the first step to make this analogy work is to criminalize TikTok.

Grimburger• 5 months ago

Yeah I can make a dropbox clone in a one-liner bash command too

Outright dismissal like this should be judged as harshly as the comment itself.

DaSHacka• 5 months ago

At least dropbox isn't addictive brainrot lol

Even the peers I know that use TikTok admit they should really be using it less and that it's total slop.

It's truly the purest interpretation of junkfood in internet form

raincole2• 5 months ago

The parent comment explained why they dismissed this in clear language. Yours is a random weird comparison to Dropbox (how is it related to this post? Which side is Dropbox, TikTok or Loops?)

wiseowise9• 5 months ago

Yeah I can make a dropbox clone in a one-liner bash command too

Jesus, is this the only argument you people have now? Some decade old comment of a non-business guy?

Parent is right, loops removes precisely what makes TikTok addicting. It’s like removing heroin high for addicts – what’s the point of the injection, then?

thunfischtoast• 5 months ago

Hackers sometimes create things not to actually use them, but because they are curious how something works and to see if they can

haltcatchfire• 5 months ago

dansup, the guy behind this, is the same guy that runs Pixelfed (a federated Instagram alternative)

gregman1• 5 months ago

I noticed that some lemmy instances and channels are managed in the same way Facebook and Reddit groups are - by corporations, using many bot accounts that fake user behavior/anctivity and make echo chamber environment.

So if corpo approach was compromised why not migrate the plethora of experience and knowledge to another platform to continue brainwashing disguised as marketing strategy and facilitation.

refulgentis• 5 months ago

TikTok is brainrot the same way YouTube is brainrot is the same way TV is brainrot is the same way moving pictures are brainrot. The medium is not the message. (I.e. TikTok is damn good)

Lio• 5 months ago

The world could do with a decent, privacy focused, YouTube competitor.

Maybe this could grow into that?

huijzer• 5 months ago

PeerTube currently seems like the best bet for that

dewey4• 5 months ago

Who is going to pay for the video bandwidth?

jampekka2• 5 months ago

A lot of older (even elderly) people watch TikTok and other short form video streams, e.g. Instagram or YouTube shorts. But I wouldn't put past kids caring about such things either.

boriskourt4• 5 months ago

TikTok has ~1.59 billion global active users, if you go to Cambodia you will have a hard time not seeing it in the wild. It is painful that this is still seen as some teen trend.

People enjoy short form video, people should be able to enjoy things they like with dignity, which is in extremely short supply on algorithm and advert driven social media.

Loops is nice because it isn't algorithm oriented. You can follow folks and just see their things if you like, or see whats on the instance.

Loops doesn't need to 'slay tiktok' Loops just needs to grow organically and support the niches that feel like using it, and it can take the time to do that at any pace. Its success is not determined by user numbers or series rounds.

I don't like to produce short form video, but its been nice to now follow a few people on Loops from Mastodon. Its nice that the Fediverse allows multiple forms of expression.

wiseowise9• 5 months ago

People enjoy short form video, people should be able to enjoy things they like with dignity, which is in extremely short supply on algorithm and advert driven social media.

People “enjoy” heroin, crack cocaine, fentanyl too, should they “enjoy” them with dignity too?

lynx972• 5 months ago

It is seen as some teen trend because... brankly... most users are rather infantil.

mft_2• 5 months ago

What you’re missing is that there’s maybe a bigger crossover between people (and age groups) who use TikTok and people who might prefer it if they weren’t tracked and monetised, than you are imagining.

My experience is that TikTok’e algorithm is so good it largely reflects the individual user. My feed is 99% wholesome - presumably because that’s how I’ve trained it over time. I’m amazed by other people’s stories of bad TikTok - just not my experience.

dewey4• 5 months ago

it if they weren’t tracked and monetised

I think that group of people if very small, but overrepresented on sites like this. Regular people just don't care. They _might_ pay to remove ads, but because they are annoying not because they are afraid of tracking or being monetized.

lloydjones• 5 months ago

Is this using ATProtocol? I wasn’t clear from the site.

Congrats!

himanshu1103• 5 months ago

What is the actual usecase?

tamimio• 5 months ago

The site is buggy, when you enable 2FA, you are given the qr code option only, no option for manual entry. When you sign up and the username is taken, you next button goes into infinite loop even after changing the username, you cannot click next, and clicking back doesn’t fix it.

pyaamb2• 5 months ago

I've been casually daydreaming about possible paths an "AI augmented" newsfeed experience could take.

I'm imagining an initial group of agents scraping the web for events (twitter/x, science/eng/business publications) that could potentially translate to stories that their end users (humans) might be interested in.

those stories get picked up by another set of bots (equivalent to reddit posters) and get published on an agent-only social network where a diverse set of agents with different "backgrounds"/personalities comment and discuss on the story.

inputs from this post (article + comments) are picked up by an 'editor' agent and go into a final summarized article designed for human eyes or humans personal agent or newsfeed agent.

humans being the end users browse their (ai enhanced) newsfeed which has its own private, continuously evolving algorithms based on knowledge of 1) what and 2) how its human likes to consume/think.

information is "backpropagated" to inform/reinforce the initial scraper group of bots on what to look out for.

bschwindHN2• 5 months ago

How about you just _don't_ contribute to the slop pile? Also, that sounds like a machine that generates self-reinforcing echo chambers.

pyaamb2• 5 months ago

I would argue that:

1. "slop" doesn't come from just AI. Take a look at the headlines on your daily newsfeed. Carefully crafted by humans.

2. This is an application of AI that serves human values by what it attempts to preserve.

johnpaulgeorge• 5 months ago

we need a platform that is not addictive. there is a simple solution. pass a very strict law: that every social media company is required to allow their user from turning off their feeds.

aembleton3• 5 months ago

I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean that users should be able to switch off feeds? Does that mean you would have to select a user first to see content? Or just not see any content?

swiftcoder• 5 months ago

Is this 'federated' as in ActivityPub? Or 'federated' as in ATProtocol? Or 'federated' as in some custom thing?

I did not find the site very enlightening about what's actually going on under the hood

flancian• 5 months ago

It's federated as in ActivityPub.

bigfishrunning3• 5 months ago

from the site:

Built for Pixelfed & the fediverse
Loops speaks ActivityPub, so your videos can reach people on Mastodon, Pixelfed and other compatible apps — while you stay in control of your home server.

fasbiner2• 5 months ago

This looks interesting, but if you don't have creepy and opaque admin controls and algorthimic manipulation that create a thousand little tinpot Larry Ellisons, you should highlight that.

Because that's why no one I know uses Mastadon.

listic2• 5 months ago

Could you please explain exactly why you think no one you know uses Mastodon? I'm trying to figure it out. I, personally am hesitant to use it first and foremost because Mastodon (and many of its lesser known alternatives) is a variant of micro-blogging (I'm appalled how extending character limit beyond 500 apparently counts as a feature in Fediverse!)

fasbiner2• 5 months ago

No, nothing cute like that.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079

The instance owner has absolute anonymity and absolute power to snoop with no access logs and no known identity. CCPA? GDPR? Access controls? Good luck! You can leave the instance, but you're leaving all your data behind for them or any future owner of the instance to do whatever they want with... forever.

And even if you trust them and everyone they will ever meet, people can and do store their server logs unencrypted.

Then argue they can't help it and you don't "get it" because that's just how the architecture has to work in order to... well it's not clear why this is a good design for the user or any better than other social media.

1) You still don't own your data 2) You still don't have any privacy 3) Every single part of the user experience is inferior or confusing and the people making it don't care because they're focused on doing what they can to connect kids with anonymous instance owners.

maelito3• 5 months ago

Not sure how the fediverse that missed the Twitter alternative because of its design complexity, will get the video market, a lot less geek.

listic2• 5 months ago

What do you mean by 'the fediverse that missed the Twitter alternative'? I thought Mastodon is the Twitter alternative. Sorry; I didn't het it.

maelito3• 5 months ago

Bluesky became that, while Mastodon had months of head start.

eitland2• 5 months ago

Let me present my take on why the federated alternatives struggle to replace X:

Twitter didn't succeed because it was a particularly good solution - it really isn't. It succeeded purely on the back of the network effect.

When every open-source alternative simply copies the existing restrictions without adding any unique value, why would users switch to an equally flawed version where none of the accounts they actually want to follow are?

maelito3• 5 months ago

People did fly to Bluesky. Some accounts there have 1 million followers.

Bluesky got the decentralisation UX right.

hypercube33• 5 months ago

I guess I don't get why all of these don't target better user experience goals - one login / trust plane and full distribution for decentralization.

The way I'd look at it is more like Bitcoin where everyone can decide how much compute to give to the pool to verify people or posts and maybe everyone shares chunks of the whole pie with copies like freenet.

Maybe I'm (likely) too dumb to get why this isn't what things in the fediverse is but they all are an awful experience and having so many hosts makes critical mass non existent so I can't be bothered to participate.

CodeCompost• 5 months ago

I briefly hosted a Lemmy server on my machine just to see how it works and my god never again. The pictures that were automatically synced to my machine did not only make me lose faith in humanity, but it made me shut down and wipe my machine immediately because I was terrified that some of those images would land me some serious jail time.

So if you choose to host something like this, be very aware that there are some sick, sick people out there.

pjc507• 5 months ago

.. ah, yes, "completely unmoderated free speech system that supports images" does mean "may contain CSAM". Heck, even Instagram had a horrific "mirror world" incident where the moderation bit got flipped on a number of images which ordinary users were exposed to.

I wouldn't run any kind of publishing system for anons myself. It's potentially valuable for an actual social group though.

balamatom5• 5 months ago

I wouldn't run any kind of publishing system for anons myself. It's potentially valuable for an actual social group though.

That's pretty much how it works on the federated Internet.

There are large open-access services run by communities with sufficient moderation capacity (to not get themselves nuked, anyway.) Turns out many "impossibilities" are trivial when you're not trying to abuse 1 billion active users at the same time through the power of their own (distr)actions - but instead you are simply trying to run a board for messages.

And then there plenty of private servers, where publishing either is by invite, or does not have outsized reach in the first place. Those also defederate each other a lot, and many don't show you stuff from the big publics at all.

There've been "bad people out there" always (or at least that's what the "good people in there" have been broadcasting, for about as long as I remember). The design/engineering problem here is how to figure out and deploy a relational dynamic that keeps hostiles at a safe distance.

The practical problem stems from a technicality of how federation currently works: to display content from other services to your users, you have to mirror it on your storage.

This mode of federating hazardous data is a real problem, and also it's exactly what some cheap-ass subcontractor of current-gen social media incumbents would be doing if said incumbents had the amount of good sense that they've demonstrated having (see e.g. https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series). Yeah cuz... it's war out there.

I don't expect things to get better until everyone's phone is their personal server and cryptographic root of trust, and this is exposed to non-technicals in a way which neither scares them nor screws them over. Once civilization accomplishes that, I reckon things will be fine once again.

EDIT: "Heck, even Instagram had a horrific "mirror world" incident where the moderation bit got flipped on a number of images which ordinary users were exposed to." I don't think I've heard about this before, but I must admit I find it completely hilarious - besides obviously sad and horrifying.

ajsnigrutin• 5 months ago

I mean... reddit also defended that.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19975375

Social news site Reddit will not censor "distasteful" sections of its website, its chief executive has said.

jailbait, upskirt, etc. were all huge subreddits back then.

sharperguy• 5 months ago

I've been hearing talk for years about a "web of trust" system, that could filter spam simply by having users vouch for eachother and filtering out anyone not vouched for. However, I haven't seen a function system based on this model yet.

Personally I'd love to add in something like the old slashdot comment model, where people would mark content as "helpful", "funny", "insightful", "controversial" etc, and based on how much you trust the people labeling it, you could have things filtered out, or brought forward.

EasyMark3• 5 months ago

yep text is bad enough, screw hosting videos and images from randos on the web. I would 100% host a forum or similar if the honor system worked, but it only takes a couple gooner CSAM deviants to ruin your entire life on something like that and you wouldn't know what happened until the gov showed up on your doorstep

rapnie• 5 months ago

This has nothing to do with Lemmy, but more with any social media that is just open to the general public. Ask the moderator teams of Facebook, what they encounter day to day. Many of these poor folks work in shitty job conditions and burn out leaving with PTSD.

If you spin up a fediverse app like Lemmy, you spin up a platform. It is platform software. And you get the responsibility, but also the opportunity, to set that up well. Curate the content in your instance. Lemmy and any other fediverse apps comes with a set of moderation tools that allow you to handle this, and there is a strong focus in the developer community to improve them on a continual basis.

pousada• 5 months ago

Curate the content in your instance

How do i do that without getting PTSD as well? Or is there some magic method that works without me looking at CSAM and gore constantly?

WD-423• 5 months ago

This is a huge ask. Most of us are just nerds that find the technical aspects interesting, a hobby during our spare time.

ehnto• 5 months ago

It's a good time to mention Safe Harbor laws, because not every country has them and so not every person can host something like this without taking on personal liability for what travels through or rests on the "platform".

balamatom5• 5 months ago

What's fucked up is that entities like Meta and OpenAI are likely to already have tons of "other people's snuff" in their datastores. Yet they're not the ones at risk of being swatted; individual rebroadcasters are.

Even though you want nothing to do with those images in the first place, while Big Social is intentionally keeping the stuff around "for science", yeah right.

Consider how some Muslim cultures have sidestepped this issue by banning representational imagery altogether; while the Russians just sent telegrams.

mghackerlady2• 5 months ago

As much as I try to avoid AI hype, this truly seems like one of the best uses of image recognition tech

lmf4lol• 5 months ago

how do you pay for that?

antonyh• 5 months ago

This was why I canned a potentially useful image project a long time ago that could resize and manipulate images from any URL to optimise for mobile use. It's also why I've not dipped my toes into the murky pool of self-hosting any of this and rather use services moderated by someone else. It's just too toxic to handle, and dangerous to my career, and I don't know how I'd contain it beyond never hosting ANY image data and making it text only.

scotty79• 5 months ago

I think the only way to host social services is so that any free form content that touches your servers is encrypted with a key you don't have.

damnesian• 5 months ago

This reality alone has made me severely curtail my own social media use and reach. I really only care about a handful of forums attended by (at least... seemingly) people who actually care to think, or have some basic intact humanity and want to converse.

So despite the fact I am very interested in the federated social media to keep my intelletual property out of the cashflow of businesses whose actions are much louder than their pretty sounds in court, it's still one-shot-and-out digital graffiti. I don't think it's worth it.

4k1l• 5 months ago

Another TikTok alternative https://upscrolled.com/en/

mikkupikku2• 5 months ago

The proprietary nature of tiktok, particularly the opaque recommendation algorithm, is only part of the problem with tiktok. I think the whole short form video medium is the bigger problem, it's not a medium that lends itself to nuance.

cyberge992• 5 months ago

It's also very detrimental to brain development.

mrguyorama• 5 months ago

Similarly, the problem with Twitter is not strictly who runs it. Short form content is brain rot. It requires you to eschew nuance and reason and complexity, dumb things down, handwave or ignore criticisms, parrot cliches, and will always prefer a short but nice sounding thing to something that requires more effort.

Short form communication like that is inherently bad.

mikkupikku2• 5 months ago

Absolutely. I think the proof of this is in the toxicity of the twitter alternatives. Despite being federated instead of centralized, they produce the same kind of toxicity. It's the medium itself which is corrupting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

jijijijij• 5 months ago

Vine was fun. I think, the actual problem is commercialization and advertisement. That's creating the incentives to hijack any form of social media and turn them into addictive brain rot machines.

giancarlostoro• 5 months ago

Neat, looks like ActivityPub based. My only nitpick is the website and app look a little too much like Tik Tok, they might want to tweak it to not be a blatant rip off, I could see Tik Tok having a valid lawsuit due to how insanely close it looks. I could see myself getting confused as to which site I'm on if I had this open in a browser, which is probably enough for a valid lawsuit.

Brajeshwar• 5 months ago

My naive thought is to NOT have these platforms, not to build an alternative.

cush2• 5 months ago

Exactly, the idea that we can "fix" social media is a completely false premise and not a technology problem

boxedemp3• 5 months ago

That may be true, but I'm still trying with one of my side projects.

If for no other reason than it's a difficult problem and fun to hack at.

roger110• 5 months ago

I want to see the Venn diagram of people who care about open source, care about federation, and want to use something like TikTok

SkyMarshal• 5 months ago

https://github.com/joinloops/loops-server/blob/main/INSTALLA...

Looks like an amalgam of php, node, mysql, redis and an AWS S3-compatible filesystem.

fragmede• 5 months ago

That's one way to do it. There are 3rd parties that make it easier to deal with video than S3, though you do pay them for that privilege.

Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok

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