Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok
joinloops.org
joinloops.org
So if you choose to host something like this, be very aware that there are some sick, sick people out there.
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.
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.
I wonder what he'd say about this today, because it comes off as extreme naivety, and I even held similar views, though I don't get how your mindset could be so extreme that your first instinct would not be to disallow content which is this distasteful. It really shows how deeply "free speech" was embedded into net culture of the time above all else.
Not to misuse this argument, but I really really wonder how he feels given 1) who he's married to 2) how he presents himself today and 3) that he has a daughter now. I'd guess this is NOT his view of running Digg,
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.
Some of the social media systems, including Bluesky, started as invite-only, but that was only ever really for rate-limiting and in particular there were no negative consequences for inviting someone who was subsequently banned.
Any attempt to generalize this by allowing multiple weak vouches instead of a single strong one, or allowing people to join before getting vouched for, or removing the stakes in vouching for someone, etc. always end up failing for fairly predictable reasons. No matter how much cool cryptography you add
HN's mirror-universe counterpart, Lobste.rs, works basically this way.
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.
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?
If a 6-day old account making highly voted posts and no comments? Bot, part of a botnet (check who upvoted, and purge as neccesary).
6 month old account, combination of high and low effort comments? Does not emit hatred with every fibre of their being? Appears to understand debate? Rational human, trust.
You do it on case-by-case basis and slowly increase your trust network
Thus reopening yourself to the trauma of viewing CSAM.
This is speculation; they may look at ips and other fingerprint data to determine if they accept your acc application.
You can avoid this in both real life and or the internet by making very closed clubs in which only very trusted people are added.
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.
But if you get popular then you better have a monetization strategy.
Imgur is a good case study I think.
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.
Its largely impossible to fund "organic decentralized" prediction markets because the vast majority of money that goes into them is "dumb money" and there will always be sharp money that takes their cut, and has substantially more funds. Betting markets are zero sum, so the smarter participants is always going to absorb the entire bankroll of the dumber participants over time..
The closest thing to what you describe were BTC dice games, which is kind decentralized, but prediction markets are impossible, some smart guy is always going to be there to make a more accurate fair on a market and eat all the liquidity from the little guys.
Isn't that entirely the point? I've heard some arguments about insider trading but even there i've heard it argued that that's part of the point.
My point is that maybe federated casino where there is no casino but sort of p2p on a completely fair 50/50 dice of sorts similar to how casinos operate would be more beneficial than casinos existing with their 3% cuts and the house3% always winning.
At the very least, its possible to do so and similar to Kalshi/Polymarket I feel like its definitely possible.
I don't want to EVER touch gambling but I think its addicting and maybe it can atleast help the addicts if they are in a fair game compared to a rigged game towards the house.
Good news: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
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)
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.
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.
Same for image, I never really understood the point of pixelfed as other fediverse/activitypub apps can already host pictures.
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.
People love to bully people who slip up... dudes a hot mess but I think he needs community more than being openly attacked.
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.
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.
Short form communication like that is inherently bad.
The only real alternative to TikTok is a big dumpster fire.
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.
There's no comparison.
But at the same time I don't necessarily buy the idea that all of their reactions/roles/badges/etc are exclusively malevolent engagement-driven design decisions meant to hook people. I do think that some of them are legitimate improvements to chat communication, and as a result many of those features have proliferated across other messaging platforms. Hell, most of them didn't even originate at discord at all but were cribbed from their competitors.
To be clear, I 1000% agree with you that IRC is less addicting. Even just by simple merit of not having multi-device push notifications. Those pull me back into the app. But push notifications across devices are also just objectively useful. I name that one in particular because it's one of the biggest and most notable features that prevents me from returning to IRC, where I happily did most of my chat until the mid 2010s. I'm actively shopping for a discord alternative as a regular user who is fed up with discord's march toward enshittification, and matrix looks like it gives me most of that convenience without the worst parts of discord.
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.
But I don't think that's healthy for either the product or society
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.
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.
Now that I'm googling for more deliberate correlations, I see other people are talking about this:
https://roytriggs.medium.com/internet-use-and-birth-rates-an...
https://fortune.com/well/2025/03/28/phones-declining-birth-r...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/dating-marriage-c...
"The phone killed babies" tracks with my intuition about this. Data correlates.
Finances aren't keeping me from having kids. The internet is. Smartphones are. Weird as that sounds. I can unpack more and expand this into a conversation.
My parents lived in apartments.
Parents for all of human civilization and history have lived in worse.
The fastest growing populations have less money and safety nets than middle class folks.
It's the dopamine and time suck.
Men and women aren't bored and looking to fill the void and boredom with children. (Kids also can't work as free labor on the farm anymore, either, but that just adds to this argument.)
Kids keep you from nights out with the friends, dating, concerts, fortnite, girl gossip, phone time, etc.
People are choosing "I don't have time for kids (now)" and continuing with their dopamine filled lives. House purchase planning is orthogonal.
In much of the world, the most expensive real estate is apartments.
People might have the faux preference for ideal conditions, but it's an artificial mask for not having time.
Severely resource constrained people have kids. People with other things to do, don't.
How exactly the internet and the career prevented you from having kids? Have you discussed this with your partner?
Even with no algo the people posting want maximum exposure and have every incentive to try to get it.
What percentage bounce at that stage? It's probably large. I did so, and although I later relented and created a Mastodon account I've felt emotionally biased against it ever since and barely use it. When I have used it I don't experience any tangible benefit to overcome my reflexive dislike. The network effects aren't anything great, the timeline/feed mechanism and presentation are not fundamentally different from other social media offerings, the QoL improvements are marginal. If I cared about architecture and ideology above all else it would be great, but what I actually care about is being able to get news faster than any other source and being able to find more people there than anywhere else. I can only think of 1 or 2 people who I check in on periodically via Mastodon because there's no other place to find them.
I'm not sure what sales funnel you're talking about. If you have an aversion to monetization, I'm not sure what social media you'd use except the fediverse.
But sure, something like this probably requires a fundamentally different revenue model. Maybe even the one where people donate to server operators.
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)
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.
Until enshittification happens. Example: the fall of Freenode.
See: custom Facebook apps that only show the part of the service you ask for - not force-feeding you whatever they want.
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.
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.
Your application also doesn't "serve human values". It just statistically gives someone content it thinks they'll want to hear/read, and hides content that might make them uncomfortable or question their own views. A self-reinforcing echo chamber, like I said.
I know AI is all the rage and everyone is trying to come up with something actually useful for it, but this isn't it.
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.
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.
I did not find the site very enlightening about what's actually going on under the hood
> 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.
If for no other reason than it's a difficult problem and fun to hack at.
[south park clip] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyOzp9pR6iE
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?
Bluesky got the decentralisation UX right.
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.
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.
There’s a middle ground solution here. TikTok does (naturally) have a version of each video without watermarks which they show in-app. They don’t let you download it, but external tools can generally help with that. What Loops could do is default to a watermarked version, but allow downloading original as well. This way, person sharing the video can decide whether they want to help promote Loops or not.
¹ – as a humanity; I’m not affiliated with Loops in any way
Needed 2 tries to sign up, and uploading a video from the camera roll failed (5-7 tries)
Looks like an amalgam of php, node, mysql, redis and an AWS S3-compatible filesystem.
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.
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.
If there is an algorithm putting stuff on people’s faces then there will always be an incentive imo.
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?
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.
Because that's why no one I know uses Mastadon.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Congrats!
What am I missing?
Sure you cut out the bad people, but is the situation improved now?
E.g. https://patrida.de/
If it's not harmful it's not the same drug. Unlike diamorphine, a medical grade supply does not reduce harm; it's more like sniffing glue, inhaling poison to escape reality.
// Sweden
How many heroin users do you know who manage to only have 1-2 hits a week socially though and hold down a career.
These are:
Alcohol (+the prescription benzo combo) Gambling Sugar
Add to these tobacco if you want. Nicotine on its won as a standalone agent is perhaps no more damaging than caffeine, but is used in a form-factor that really grills one's lungs.
for example - Russian influenced Balkan areas all take drinking of vodka as something super normal.
Heroin (diamorphine) as a molecule isn't really substantially more problematic than e.g. oxycodone or fentanyl, which are in widespread medical use. The specific ban of heroin is more a historical contingency.
Outright dismissal like this should be judged as harshly as the comment itself.
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
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
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?
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.
Maybe this could grow into that?
If it would work well for every user streaming services wouldn't spend millions on CDNs and streaming infra.
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.
People “enjoy” heroin, crack cocaine, fentanyl too, should they “enjoy” them with dignity too?
There's a lot of stuff which may loosely be termed "vices", e.g. alcohol and gambling, which have the property:
- many people never touch
- many people indulge without significant harm, getting enjoyment from the process
- some people over indulge messily
- a few people get their lives completely ruined, or ruin the lives of those around them
Then there's an uncomfortable, unreconcilable tension between the desire to punish/prevent the last group by banning the thing, versus the second group entirely reasonably saying that it's not a problem for them.
Many things that people get up to ostensibly "of their own accord" have these four groups of outcomes, in different proportions. Makes you figure.
I'm of the opinion that the main problem has always been the increasing powerlessness of the individual in the face of mass social phenomena that camouflage as "your life now" but are instead someone's viral PR campaign. In Germany this stuff passed in 10ish years, in Russia it passed in 80ish; California still countin'
I'm not sure if you ever had to deal with someone addicted close to you, but it is heartbreaking. They are already ashamed of themselves and suffer. The last thing you want to do is take away their dignity, because that shuts them out and puts the path to recovery even further. They are still humans you know, just with a problem. They need help, not a trashing. That they are already doing to themselves.
That seems a little uncharitable, though it does get me wondering... Imagine if benevolent hackers took over The Algorithm. What might they achieve?
They could promote high quality educational content, as is done in certain other nations.
They could utilize the companies' infinite knowledge of Skinner box mechanics to discourage and even break screen addiction, rather than cultivate it.
The possibilities are endless.
Any volunteers? ;)
That discussion is already over since, what... 20 years? Heroin addicts get their fix from the state, with tax payer money, in many many countries these days. I can see the line waiting in front of my pharmacy every day in the morning...
Only enjoyment from drugs, they're free to do it with dignity without enjoyment.
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.
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.
There's another group who don't necessarily take any action immediately, but might switch if there was a competitive alternative. But of course there's a network effect: being an early adopter of Signal (over Whatsapp) was lonely but eventually enough people came along. Bluesky is doing okay vs. Twitter. Without people trying to offer an alternative, nothing will ever change.
1. users and initial flywheel. 2. content moderation.
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/
One alternative I’ve heard of that apparently became popular is Skylight: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/26/tiktok-alternative-skyligh...
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.
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.
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.
However, it is a little silly to suggest that UFC is not extremely popular. I myself have wasted hours flipping through UFC reels.
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.
Checking loops.video now, these were the first 5 videos I saw, in order:
1. Left-Wing American Politics
2. Promotion of the Fediverse and Loops
3. Left-Wing American Politics
4. A Non-English Play
5. Left-Wing American Politics
6. Stop Motion Flipbook Thing
7. Advocation for Loops Itself and Decentralization
8. Loops Promo
9. Left-Wing American Politics
So out of the first 9 videos, 4 centre around American politics, 1 I couldn't understand, 3 were promotion for the service I was currently using and only one was interesting and understandable.
If it's anything like the rest of the Fediverse applications, it's meant to give you a full chronological feed of people you subscribe to. While several of these sites seem to have a simple trending page, one of the themes of the Fediverse seems to be getting away from overly predatory algorithms and leaning into letting people curate their own feeds and interactions again.
It sounds a lot like a "be the change" situation. If you want to see other stuff, follow people you like instead of drinking from the hose. It's still a small site, so if you don't see the content you want, then make it or build the community there.
These sites can also have basic interoperability. I don't know if the Loops UI supports subscribing to people in other Fedi networks yet, but I've seen people say Loops videos have started trickling onto Mastodon.
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.
I think a lot of Fedi people want that, but the community is still small. It's a bit of a chicken and egg, so I would encourage you to create the content or communities you want to see.
I'm not a Loops user atm though.
There are hidden reasons behind centralized solutions, that make decentralized solutions unpopular. If anyone suggests "just go out and make it better", it's missing the point. That's like saying: "don't participate in society, just start your own". In theory it makes sense, in practice it's just ignorance and lack of awareness on how difficult and complex task it is.
Centralized solutions are often just a business, they're not transparent, they're not cooperative, they're not ethical, they're there to conquer market and there's big money behind them, they're part of surveillance capitalism.
These are just examples, but there's lot more, so in context of social media, it's intertwined with the rest of simulation called "real world", so almost no one is going to know what you're talking about, when mention Loops/Mastodon/Bluesky, people know dominant platforms and stick to them and they may do so as part of social pressure and because they compete for status. In this society, you won't gain status by using Loops. People are buying iPhone for status, even though something like Samsung or Fairphone would be good as well. People are buying luxury frames for glasses, because they want to show brand, they don't care that it's more expensive and quality is basically they same.
I often talk to people about Signal irl, most download the app but some folks do. Some people actually want a For You feed and will bounce off Loops, Mastodon, or whatever. That's all fine. These spaces can have content about cars or guns or whatever else without eating the entire world.
You said:
> I want loops/mastodon to be a diverse place that has content from all over the internet.
Again, I think lots of people who are already in the Fediverse want that. But, if everybody who likes cars decides they won't join in until somebody who shares content about cars does, that car community may never show up.
You seem to have interests that you feel are undeserved. Just... regularly share things about what you think is cool. Just do it for funsies.
If you really feel strongly about wanting to make a diverse space, cross promote your stuff in spaces with other people who have the same interests. Share a post, share a video, ask them to follow you. Maybe even start an instance dedicated to the topic if that's your vision.
One approach is based on science, other bases on unfounded feelings. Some people will use these decentralized platforms, but that's not the point. My point is that it's not as simple as just telling people around you "just use this". There are systemic reasons why most people don't use them and serious analysis starts once you get it. Without that it's just wishful thinking, so sure, you will get something on these platforms, but it's like one commenter here mentioned, he tried Loops, used it for a while and it's mostly trash for him, while better community will never appear there.
To get real traction and user base on such decentralized platforms, we would need to change the way society functions first. That's why it's impossibly hard challenge. Without foundations, such projects are doomed to fail, they just can't compete with mainstream, centralized platforms.
> 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.
Okay. If you don't want to participate, don't. But, if your other comment about wanting to see a more diverse audience join was honest, then do. Either way.
There's traction. There's a user base. There are people enjoying and getting use out of it. There's plenty of communities and relationships that will go on just fine regardless of what you decide.
You seem to be frustrated about something, maybe that the fediverse isn't matching Facebook in size? It won't. It probably can't, since the commercial incentives aren't there. But, at no point does that invalidate what exists.
That's all I'm going to say about it.
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.
There is no advantage to centralised systems in this regard: they have all the same problems.
> 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.
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.
Ha
haha
>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
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.
edit: which is to say I'm not positive the format isn't the problem.
Those aren't the kinds of book-related videos that I see, so at some point The Algorithm must've decided I wasn't interested in porn for women (not that there's anything wrong with that).
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.
And YouTube also had those stupid challenges with everyone doing the same stupid shit before TikTok even existed.
And before the transistor, we had flagpole sitters[0] and dance marathons[1] and dozens of other memes, just in the 20th century.
This kind of thing is nothing new, and has been going on for as long we've been us. Now this is accessible to a larger and more varied audience, not just those who are nearby.
The meme could be good. The mixes could be good. But...is that what is actually happening? Or is someone hoping to create their own version that gets view in competition with the original so they can squeeze out some monetization from a trend and hoping the algorithm lotto smiles upon them?
Exactlym that's the feeling I get with it.
I noticed a lot of "creators" are constantly repeating the same skit over and over and over too. With different backgrounds etc. Clearly a way to try and get noticed by the algorithm. But also a great way to get them blocked by me of course.
Out of curiosity, I asked my wife about this trend specifically, and while she was familiar with the joke, she has yet to see any instance of it on her page. I have to wonder if people who are experiencing stuff like this are mostly just getting stuck in a bubble and not pushing through to other content. There's an argument that learning how to interact with the app to make the algorithm work for you isn't a great experience, but there's a large volume of people who use and enjoy the app without complaining about this issue. I'm not particularly convinced that all of these people have gone numb to brainrot to the point that they enjoy seeing the same joke 20 times in a row compared to them just having a better experience from seeing a wider variety of content.
> complaints on humor subreddits about how people repeatedly post copies of the same jokes, often without attribution
This feels like a reflection of what the person feels posting on the internet signifies. Are you publishing something, and thus you should attribute sources etc, or are you just having a conversation?
You would never attribute sources when making a joke in real life. I guess you could but it would be a pretty dorky thing to do.
congratulations on discovering mimesis
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.
If I'm on the toilet not having a fun time, pardon me for wanting to see some cat videos instead of solving a Rubik's Cube, I guess?
But also, of course people aren't just using these apps in the bathroom, they are using them everywhere. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't miss scrolling the bathroom.
But I do maintain that there is a place for mindless time killing. Life is stressful, I'm constantly switching between different projects and responsibilities, and a few minutes of mindless scrolling is nice.
But it is very addicting and can very easily vacuum up many hours of time I can't get back.
Anyway, I'm a bit crusty about the world right now so sorta going off. Don't mind me.
This is a great writeup on why short-form content is overall a net negative for us with a human brain.
this level of reductive thought termination goes nowhere
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?
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.
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.
But no one will say why
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).
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/01/here-are-the-apps-battling...