The Fediverse is getting its own TikTok competitor called Loops
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Hey, PeerTube is already open source, and works on ActivityPub:
this article is sort of clickbaity
Note, https://loops.video/ splash page doesn't even have any content, just a sign up.
"...interested testers will be emailed when it’s possible to actually start using the new app..."
kinda seems fishy.
Note, PeerTube is functional - you can watch and download videos on it today!
What I will say is that I have tried self-hosting PeerTube in the past and it felt very heavy-duty, and I'm not sure I would try to host it again.
Here's a development update from 10 hours ago:
https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113378164241466277
> I'm still working hard on @loops@pixelfed.social and aim to get the TestFlight and APK in your hands ASAP
Who knows, the launch of Loops might break that pattern, but it would be a more enduring victory to build attractive products that are 1) new and 2) not replicable in centralized form.
Every time Elon does something particularly stupid with Twitter, Mastodon takes on another wave of new accounts. It seems to be doing fine.
in the meantime for much of the planet the "internet" means Meta properties.
if you don't ask tough questions you will "keep doing fine" and nothing will change
It seems that Bluesky has a different opinion on who actually benefits from the Twitter implosion, at least the last episode https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/16/bluesky-now-has-10-million...
And at least one Mastodon user seems to be very anxious about it: https://masto.es/@pablogilah/113064426425857890
But my point is not about protocol wars or disputing that fediverse platforms are "good enough" for a small number of niche users, predominantly techies. The challenge is to take the fediverse mainstream. When somebody is building a "Tiktok competitor" this is clearly what they have in mind.
I liken the Fediverse to the old internet, where you had personal sites and blogs and forums. Many of those never had millions of views or millions of users and they did fine. The draw of the Fediverse is opting out of the commercial surveillance and exploitation driven web ecosystem and every "x for fediverse" alternative makes it look more attractive.
and Mastodon/Bluesky don’t have their own flavors of each, except in a form that prevents any contrary (or factual) word from piercing the filter bubble?
With TikTok pretty much the whole point of the platform is algorithmic ranking to provide users an endless stream of content. I'm not using it but I get why it works. I see people using it in public transport all the time watching short clips of whatever. It has an addictive quality, apparently. And that's intentional.
A platform that doesn't do the ranking and doesn't have the content producers targeting it because there is no ad money, is fundamentally going to be very different. Boring probably.
I assume loops is planning to not do that. But then that raises the question what they are looking to get out of the fediverse connection.
(No idea what user numbers were, but it was ubiquitous.)
Honestly, that seems like a feature, not a bug. We already have commercially focused content platforms, not every platform needs to be engineered to maximize engagement, addiction and revenue.
And once you start playing with addons, why pay for premium if you can just block ads too?
What doesn't help is that the Fediverse can't just design its own protocol and run with it, the whole point is for stuff to be federated. A minimal compatibility with platforms like Mastodon or another video platform is expected, and that makes developing these platforms just a tad more difficult.
This isn't exclusive to the Fediverse either. HN is a Reddit clone, which itself is a clone of every similar platform before it, going back all the way to NNTP and before; Facebook cloned Twitter into Threads, just about every messenger on my phone is just copies of copies, Google Docs is a worse copy of Microsoft Office, Bing is just Google with a theme, and so on.
AKA "Meetup but not tied to Meetup" (and French!)
I love these different projects that aren't going the beaten path of the advertising industry. Life gets a bit harder in a way but also less distractions.
The landing page of that service says that it is: “an ethical alternative to Facebook events, groups and pages”.
That's how you get every 12 year old girl on the planet to use your app in the first place. No secret club nonsense.
Events aim to bring and bind together a small number of real people in localized communities, so less room for online troll/bot farms, less scope for remote control, data mining / algorithmization of everything.
It is deployable in a single VPS and there is a magic moment when it federates events with the (few) other mobilizon servers. With some further investment in usability and functionality it would be ready for prime time.
Whether the world will mobilize, though, that is another question...
They seem to have Good Enough amount of people on them, as there are daily users, and the services seem to work for the purposes they were built. Couldn't that be considered a success?
> Couldn't that be considered a success?
It is actually enormous success given the resources. But when you consider the vast and rapidly growing number of people trapped in the handful of adtech platforms then you must either concede that the status-quo is unchangeable or change strategy.
People want to carve out a space on the web that isn’t controlled by surveillance capitalism, fuck let them. They don’t have to dismantle the entire infrastructure to deserve that.
With the twitter exodus, I was afraid that it would lose that, due to the sheer amount of ex twitter people joining and posting about nothing of interest.
But it didn't happen. It's still as great as it always was. Imo it's actually much more like hacker news than like twitter. Though maybe it depends on who you interact with.
ActivityPub has an outbox and an inbox. The outbox looks a lot like RSS, and allows for publishing things. The inbox allows you to receive interaction. Likes, replies, boosts, etc...
RSS works without authentication (though you can require it) because your server doesn't have to know who is following you or how to notify them. ActivityPub is an attempt to add pub/sub to RSS, they actually started with many of the same data models from RSS and its successors if I'm not mistaken.
Combine that with ActivityPub being federated rather than peer-to-peer and you end up with a lot of legal gray area to go along with the added complexity and loss of anonymity.
That won't be possible without centralization, monetization and data mining. Loops will fail — if you judge by usage, that is.
The goal posts will move to whatever was achieved, I guess.
From "competition" to "for Fediverse users" to "offering an alternative" to "showing it's technically feasible" to "it's good people don't use it, because it wasn't meant to be addictive anyway."
You do not need the algorithm when each users feed is being pumped by what has been siloed within that fediverse.
And like others have pointed out, I don't think it's productive for the fediverse to go after this market.
Even YouTube was bleeding money when it was acquired.
i used to run an instance and i am skeptical of your numbers.
are you using external storage for user media elsewhere?
do you federate with the broader ecosystem?
these numbers are otherwise nonsensical, a 20 dollar do droplet has like 100gb of storage space, and 3Tb of transfer, that'd be chewed up in less than a week by those users.
Oops, you were right about media storage. I use DigitalOcean's Spaces, and that's about another $20 per month for ~1.5TB of images and stuff.
Akkoma was a forward and more resource-efficient variant built in Elixir. Last I checked.
There are a gajillion *key forks. Think Misskey was the starting point.
Honk seems fun and is in Go.
Fediverse is not one software package. Mastodon is. Many are Mastodon-compatible.
It is funny how SV is copying TikTok, while, at the same time, pushing hard to ban it.
Youtube already has TikTok copy (scroll to next video) from some time.
The whole ecosystem makes Meta and Twitter look like bastions of free speech by comparison.
It was a worthwhile experiment, but one whose outcome was "we have to do this at the protocol level if we actually want it to work."