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.
The inherent problem is money. Sites that store and serve text can be very cheaply run. Sites that store and serve video are expensive. The storage and throughput demands are much higher. In order to get videos to load quickly, you need a CDN. Nobody of average means can run a TikTok clone as a hobby.
