Obviously Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. are federated decentralized equivalent to their centralized counterparts, but what is the counterpart in the fediverse to TikTok? It is a dominant app for millions of people, and as far as I can tell the closest thing is Peertube, but isn’t that more of a YouTube equivalent? Does it not exist because the bandwidth and storage costs are just too great? Or because the algorithmic nature of content selection is inherently anti-fediverse in some way? Clearly many people choose to interact with each other this way, but it seems like a gap in the fediverse and I was wondering why.
But what all is needed for tracking? AI-based metadata extraction from the video and metrics of how long the user watched the video before swiping or rewinding or stuff? That can all be done at the instance level. I’d imagine the bigger issues is the engineering involved in the app content creation tools, and the costs of data storage for all of those videos and bandwidth for distributing them, something TikTok currently just foots the bills for. Arguably an open source equivalent wouldn’t have the privacy stigma around it, right?
Honestly, I think the cost of data storage and bandwidth would easily be the biggest hurdle. Video takes up loads more space than text or even images, so I’m not sure if it would be feasible for any volunteer entity to support unlimited free video uploading.
That’s where smaller, niche hosting sites could pop up and mesh together through federation. Sure, big corporate hosting sites will exist, but many content creators will probably turn to smaller instances or even self host, so that they can have finer control of their videos, communities, and profits, but still be compatible with the fediverse and thus compatible with federated video players. It really puts power in the content creators hands. I am interested to see where it goes.
Tiktok takes into account much more than that. Have you looked at the app permissions? Location, sex, age, device info, data from 3rd parties, camera, microphone, clipboard, contacts… And that’s just off the top of my head. Hiding that fact makes it very convenient because I sure as hell would not voluntarily give all that data (and more) to anyone.
