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.
As far as I know, no one tried to clone TikTok for the fediverse. But I think the inherent problem is the algorithm. TikTok isn’t like Youtube or any other social network, where you follow people. You have an algorithm that tracks everything you do and watch and then suggests you video based on their topics, less on the people in them. I guess it’d be hard to implement, as many in the fediverse are not keen about tracking.
Conceivably you could open source the algorithm, or even better, have a variety of algorithms to choose from with custom parameters.
In a similar vein, I’m not sure if anyone remembers Slacker Radio, but it was a competitor to Pandora/Spotify/etc. It had its drawbacks (hence why it isn’t around anymore), but I absolutely loved the amount of control you had when building custom stations. You’d first seed a custom station with a bunch of musicians you like, and then there were a number of parameters which allowed you to fine-tune the algorithm to a remarkable extent, well beyond what today’s music apps offer.
I’d love to get to a place where we have options other than just saying “welp the algorithm” and just giving up, I think that the ability to customize one’s algos would be a killer feature that the fediverse can offer which the major platforms generally won’t.
You could probably run such an algorithm locally by logging data locally then determining a type of video which could then be requested from the server. On top of that to get even more data privacy you could store the data collected for this as different numbers in a 3d array or other data structure and then use some form of math to determine what would be best based on that so any personally identifiable information will be really obfuscated and nearly impossible to use for anything other than the algorithm it’s designed to be used by. This would then allow users to not only fine tune their own personal algorithm parameters, but could open the door for allowing people to write their own algorithms or systems to do this.
might be a good idea for someone to make such a thing as TikTok has been getting closer and closer to getting banned in more and more places. There may very well be a twitter-like opportunity for someone with such an app to swoop in and gain some market share
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.
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.
I can see it happening at some point especially with all the alternatives but it’d be really hard to get that appeal especially with how some people within the fediverse view tiktok. You’re also gonna have a hard time in my opinion getting users from TiktTok over so you can’t really appeal to that crowd. I wouldn’t say its impossible but it’d just be really really difficult.
I mean network effects are real. You always have a hard time moving users over to a new network platform. Are you saying that anyone using TikTok right now arguable does not care about privacy at all so would be unlikely to see the value of federated decentralized apps?
Not really. The same reason why alot of social media is still incredibly successful even when they are actively violating your privacy; people just want something easy to use and out of the way. They don’t care at all as long as it works so when you try to give them an alternative, they might join but then see that no one is on their or is much more difficult and as such results in them hopping and then leaving.
But how is that a different problem than mastodon or Lemmy or friendica face? What makes TikTok different?
There is Goldfish, which was started with beeing some sort of TikTok alternative in mind. But it’s stuck in a very early stage and doesn’t seem to be developed anymore. If I remember correctly the Admin started it as a practice for themself to get more into Activity Pub.
They have a Mastodon account and a github page, maybe you can ask them there if they plan to develop it further. And since it is open source and can be forked by anyone and everyone can contribute to it, maybe someone will be found who is interested in continuing to work on the project.
On Goldfish’s github page I also found Vidzy by accident, where developement seems to be more active. However, I found no active instances so far where one could test it.
Peertube as you said is the closest equivalent as a video distributor. Technically a similar approach to Peertube would work by using both Torrents and Instance data storage. Now what makes Tik Tok so popular is its algorithm, which mind you, is a tiny wee bit manipulative. In future, Peer Tube might implement something like dedicated sections for vertical videos. But without a significant cultural shift, I’m not seeing an effective Tik Tok clone appear without a lot of noses being turned up.
using both Torrents and Instance data storage
IMO, anything based on peer-to-peer sharing is a nonstarter, not with the kind of video bandwidth demands that a TikTok or equivalent would put on cell phone networks. You might get it working on desktop, but I’d bet good money that the cell networks & Apple & Google would move to lock that s*** down ASAP.
Torrents have been around for over 20 years and most of the time infamous for its abundance of “linux distros”. Citation needed.
Sure, but people generally aren’t downloading torrents on cell phones. Apple devices make it very difficult (torrent clients are explicitly excluded on Apple Store for iOS), and while you can get torrent clients on the Google store, people aren’t using them for live video as far as I know.
Cell phone TOS usually explicitly prohibit peer-to-peer sharing, and I got my so-called “unlimited data” Sprint service cancelled back in 2010 for exactly that.
As long as peer-to-peer on phones is rare, nobody will notice, but if somebody spun up a competitor to TikTok that depended on serving video FROM phones to the rest of the Internet, and it started to get significant traction, I think the cell phone companies would bring an end to it.
most of the time infamous for its abundance of “linux distros”
What the heck does that have to do with watching viral videos on cell phones? We’re talking about a competitor to TikTok. With respect, Linux is like 3% of the desktop market, anything happening on Linux endpoints is noise to the big players.
Non-retardation?
TikTok works because it has a powerful algorithm and because people like being blasted with non stop shorts. That’s really not healthy at all.
