In the last few months i really gotten into the whole Fediverse thing, but i noticed that, despite it being the most popular Social Media Platform, there isn’t a TikTok alternative. I know there is Loops, but it’s not open source or federated yet, so it’s not really an option. Why is that?
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Nobody pays for that much bandwidth without the ability to manipulate you through profiling and impressions. You are the product. The product is not sharing videos. There is no fediverse platform that makes you its whore. If you were to make a video sharing platform, it would never work, because that is not the product, it’s only a feature of what makes up the dopamine machine.
Lemmy will also never outgrow commercial platforms, because the commercial platforms also never were about content.
Nobody pays for that much bandwidth without the ability to manipulate you through profiling and impressions. You are the product. The product is not sharing videos. There is no fediverse platform that makes you its whore. If you were to make a video sharing platform, it would never work, because that is not the product, it’s only a feature of what makes up the dopamine machine.
I mean, video streaming platforms already exist as part of the fediverse (Peertube) so i would disagree on you with you on that one.
That’s a good point, and I don’t really have enough insights to properly respond to that. I did think about Peertube, and I believe that a site like TikTok is different, because it relies on the ability to broadcast a large number of short videos, specifically with lots of skips.
Streaming one video for several minutes, and skipping between numerous videos every couple of seconds, is orders of magnitude more expensive. Video compression works on the idea that you store entire pictures rarely, and then just encode the difference between each frame. When you constantly need the start of videos, you constantly need the full picture of the first frame. This induces a much higher bandwidth requirement than with video that streams for several minutes continuously. Also consider the response time that is required to make the TikTok experience work. Then also consider that you need to attract enough content contributors to make this work. You can’t just upload some ancient archive of 45 minute videos. You need to drive the machine.
So, to produce a TikTok experience, you also need to design for an attractive ingress of free content.
This is just not replicable in a free environment.
Most of the content on TikTok is created by people because they want to earn money with it. But most of it isn’t content which would make it possible to build up a supporter base through Patreon, OnlyFans etc. So where is the money going to come from to attract such content creators to a potential Fediverse TikTok alternative?
I really doubt that average TikTok (or instagram, or youtube) aims at monetizing video. It’s a way to share photo and video more than a way to make money. but I may be wrong.
Video content is really computationally expensive to play and store. Seems like it requires centralization to make the service fast and responsive with enough storage.
I suppose I could imagine some kind of ephemeral TikTok that deletes videos from storage after a set amount of time. Or a lowfi TikTok that only allows uploads in 240p. Otherwise I just can’t see it.
A peertube approach would be a great way of saving bandwidth
[TikTok is] the most popular Social Media Platform
I’m not calling you a liar, but this is news to me. Do you have any data to back up that assertion?
Correct. Seems more like 5th.
YouTube is a social network?
I’m often surprised by how active and “engaged” the comment section can get, especially on live videos.
I am often surprised how toxic yt comments are.
