"...Still in the early stages, Loops is not yet open sourced, nor has it completed its integration with ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, and other federated apps..."
Hey, PeerTube is already open source, and works on ActivityPub:
This. It's by @dansup@mastodon.social and if there's anything I've learned about this internaut it's that dansup delivers. The work on Pixelfed is exceptional.
The fediverse strategy of offering copycats of centralized adtech social media - but without the surveillance and ads - has not worked in the past.
Who knows, the launch of Loops might break that pattern, but it would be a more enduring victory to build attractive products that are 1) new and 2) not replicable in centralized form.
Replicating what TikTok does would involve doing things that most users of Mastodon don't want: algorithmic ranking of their content. Even implementing simple search has been controversial.
With TikTok pretty much the whole point of the platform is algorithmic ranking to provide users an endless stream of content. I'm not using it but I get why it works. I see people using it in public transport all the time watching short clips of whatever. It has an addictive quality, apparently. And that's intentional.
A platform that doesn't do the ranking and doesn't have the content producers targeting it because there is no ad money, is fundamentally going to be very different. Boring probably.
I assume loops is planning to not do that. But then that raises the question what they are looking to get out of the fediverse connection.
The fediverse is full of people still creating content for fun rather than commercial motives. As a result it's a lot nicer too. YouTube is now unwatchable, even if you have premium you need something like sponsorblock as well. There's just so much garbage out there.
And once you start playing with addons, why pay for premium if you can just block ads too?
>What will content creators gain from this platform? Nothing.
Honestly, that seems like a feature, not a bug. We already have commercially focused content platforms, not every platform needs to be engineered to maximize engagement, addiction and revenue.
Most people posting on tiktok aren't professional content creators with monetization in mind. And I'm not even sure the biggest revenue stream of influencer comes through the app itself (a friend's brother is an Instagram “influencer” for a living, and he makes the bulk of his money through partnerships on the side not directly from Meta, and I know it's the case for many YouTubers as well).
The other half of what made it successful was the insane video creation tools with insane ease of use. Getting 90% of a really good result effects wise with 10% of the effort was made possible for many scenarios pretty early from what I remember.
How to distribute content is a protocol level concern. Whether/how to rank it is a question for the user agent. The Loops client will likely at least have an option of a ranked feed.
There are plenty of new ideas happening on the Fediverse but without the advertising budget none of them are catching on. So, instead, you end up with "Twitter but not tied to just Twitter" and "Instagram but not just tied to Meta", because those are services people recognise. A good example of this may be https://joinmobilizon.org/en/, which I haven't heard of a non-Fediverse alternative for.
What doesn't help is that the Fediverse can't just design its own protocol and run with it, the whole point is for stuff to be federated. A minimal compatibility with platforms like Mastodon or another video platform is expected, and that makes developing these platforms just a tad more difficult.
This isn't exclusive to the Fediverse either. HN is a Reddit clone, which itself is a clone of every similar platform before it, going back all the way to NNTP and before; Facebook cloned Twitter into Threads, just about every messenger on my phone is just copies of copies, Google Docs is a worse copy of Microsoft Office, Bing is just Google with a theme, and so on.
Oh, is that David Revoy graphics I see there? Why yes, it is! Mobilizon looks just like what my daughter was looking for, thanks!
I love these different projects that aren't going the beaten path of the advertising industry. Life gets a bit harder in a way but also less distractions.
mobilizon is a great concept. It embodies the "decentralization" promise of the fediverse better than microblogging and similar publishing oriented platforms that have no concept of locality.
Events aim to bring and bind together a small number of real people in localized communities, so less room for online troll/bot farms, less scope for remote control, data mining / algorithmization of everything.
It is deployable in a single VPS and there is a magic moment when it federates events with the (few) other mobilizon servers. With some further investment in usability and functionality it would be ready for prime time.
Whether the world will mobilize, though, that is another question...
What exactly is "has not worked in the past" supposed to mean? There are lots of ActivityPub services around, and while they might not have taken over the world like Twitter did at one point, maybe not every service out there need to have "Take over the world" as their success criteria?
They seem to have Good Enough amount of people on them, as there are daily users, and the services seem to work for the purposes they were built. Couldn't that be considered a success?
Depending on how you count the fediverse / activitystream/pub concepts are now more than a decade old. There have been indeed many AP services around, but practically none - except Mastodon - has seen any significant adoption. That exception is almost certainly because of the Twitter "situation" (incidentally currently boosting also the traction of the unrelated Bluesky/ATProto project) which has created a small window of opportunity. No such window exists for the other centralized social media / adtech platforms and adoption of all other services (video, audio, pictures, forums, events, professional profiles etc.) is therefore minimal.
> Couldn't that be considered a success?
It is actually enormous success given the resources. But when you consider the vast and rapidly growing number of people trapped in the handful of adtech platforms then you must either concede that the status-quo is unchangeable or change strategy.
I've used mastodon for years before the twitter thing and there was always a lot of content and engagement. It may have been more niche groups/servers talking about niche things which was great.
With the twitter exodus, I was afraid that it would lose that, due to the sheer amount of ex twitter people joining and posting about nothing of interest.
But it didn't happen. It's still as great as it always was. Imo it's actually much more like hacker news than like twitter. Though maybe it depends on who you interact with.
The status quo before fediverse-type services was the lack of existence of fediverse-type services. Therefore, the continued existence of fediverse-type services proves that the status quo is changeable.
People want to carve out a space on the web that isn’t controlled by surveillance capitalism, fuck let them. They don’t have to dismantle the entire infrastructure to deserve that.
and Mastodon/Bluesky don’t have their own flavors of each, except in a form that prevents any contrary (or factual) word from piercing the filter bubble?
But my point is not about protocol wars or disputing that fediverse platforms are "good enough" for a small number of niche users, predominantly techies. The challenge is to take the fediverse mainstream. When somebody is building a "Tiktok competitor" this is clearly what they have in mind.
"niche" and "mainstream" are moving targets, but from what I've observed, plenty of non-techie people are already on the fediverse. Even if you don't consider that mainstream, adoption is clearly moving in that direction. And even if the fediverse never becomes "mainstream" (centralization may simply always be the most popular model because of lower friction and convenience) that's still OK.
I liken the Fediverse to the old internet, where you had personal sites and blogs and forums. Many of those never had millions of views or millions of users and they did fine. The draw of the Fediverse is opting out of the commercial surveillance and exploitation driven web ecosystem and every "x for fediverse" alternative makes it look more attractive.
Mastodon isn't trying to replace any incumbent properties. The concept doesn't even make sense for a federated network. Not everything is a zero sum game of capitalist growth and competition, and there are valid definitions of success which do not require Mastodon completely subsume Twitter. I think it's OK to simply be an alternative.
You seem to have missed the point that the OP is about a newly launched fediverse TikTok competitor [1], not Mastodon. I am not sure the people building Loops want it to be "small and unpopular". You are also confusing server size with the overall adoption of these platforms.
I am trying to tell you that the broader movement for (re)decentralization is stalling and that is (in part) because it too closely emulates the successes of centralized adtech media.
So... partaking in the 'fediverse' - whatever that stands for - requires signing up. Now I'm wondering two things: 1) How is that different than FB or Twixxer? And 2) Why not use RSS, OPML and the open web that's already like... open?
I'm still haven't gotten to Evan Prodromou's ActivityPub book, so I may be wrong on some of the details here but my understanding is:
ActivityPub has an outbox and an inbox. The outbox looks a lot like RSS, and allows for publishing things. The inbox allows you to receive interaction. Likes, replies, boosts, etc...
I don't think you have to signup just to get an ActivityPub feed, but if you want to use a third parties services you may need an account with that third party.
The big difference, and why I've never personally aligned well with the fediverse, is that its a push model rather than a pull model.
RSS works without authentication (though you can require it) because your server doesn't have to know who is following you or how to notify them. ActivityPub is an attempt to add pub/sub to RSS, they actually started with many of the same data models from RSS and its successors if I'm not mistaken.
100% that's it. With a pull model you just need to make your own content available for anyone who requests it. With a push model you have to have some record of who subscribed to it and how to get them your new content.
Combine that with ActivityPub being federated rather than peer-to-peer and you end up with a lot of legal gray area to go along with the added complexity and loss of anonymity.
I think the kind of people on the Fediverse are much more likely to recognize that this kind of short form content is bad for you, so I'm not sure this will be too popular.
Do they? The most popular service on the Fediverse is Mastodon, a service specifically for short-form content (character limit is 500 or something I think), and it seems to thrive as far as I can tell, which if Mastodoners were resistant to short-form content, it wouldn't.
I thought the same but I came to like how youtube handles shorts, I'm not sure if that's a bug on their side but I consider that a great feature. When doomscrolling it will show already watched short at like 20 or so intervals, so I can both doom scroll for quick dopamine dose and stop when I realize I already watched this short so the brain handles separation more easily.
I'm excited to try this, whenever it's ready. Fediverse services like peertube are great for building small communities around specific subjects/ themes. Sometimes it even feels like the old days of subject-specific forums and IRC channels that became social groups unto themselves.
TikTok isn't about the videos, it's about the recommendations.
That won't be possible without centralization, monetization and data mining. Loops will fail — if you judge by usage, that is.
The goal posts will move to whatever was achieved, I guess.
From "competition" to "for Fediverse users" to "offering an alternative" to "showing it's technically feasible" to "it's good people don't use it, because it wasn't meant to be addictive anyway."
Why wouldn't it be possible without centralisation and monetization? You need some style of data mining, but it can be "ingest list of summaries with attributes and decide at instance/device level what to serve". The monetization may be useful to incentivise creation, but not for the service to exist in general.
by the standard of calling anything on the fediverse "competitive" with tiktok ,Et al
makes all of us comenting here, challengers to
the heavy weight boxing title of the world
and to further unpackage the title, the idea of
"hype it till you make it" as applied to the unarticulated premise of the fediverse,ie: that fairness is somehow self evident and therefor somehow the inevitable choise and outcome for
social media is doubly absurd
facsism always starts with the basic notion that if people wont recognise and accept "fairness" then for there own good, it must be imposed
All the comments here are so short sighted about how the fediverse functions. Instead of one big app doing all the aggregatation by interests the fediverse is naturally divided by what makes that group cohesive.
You do not need the algorithm when each users feed is being pumped by what has been siloed within that fediverse.
Wait.. the virtual crack only works due to massive server farms.Opwn source doesn't have these. So they need to acquire these. They need money for that, which means adds, which means closed source in the long run.
i am assuming the majority of those users are not active then?
are you using external storage for user media elsewhere?
do you federate with the broader ecosystem?
these numbers are otherwise nonsensical, a 20 dollar do droplet has like 100gb of storage space, and 3Tb of transfer, that'd be chewed up in less than a week by those users.
Or maybe we can get regulate short-form media. I've never been a fan of such a wasteful format with so little accountability. You drastically shorten attention spans with such media that it doesn't benefit anyone. Although I've seen a few short-form media used to to explain small scientific phenomenons.
We used to have regulation on TV and media for broadcasting before the Internet. This encouraged a level of standards across media that ensured the safety for viewers alike. While this might not seem like an issue for you as a user, statistically children watch more YouTube and social media than any other person. While this might be a parent problem restricting access the quick dopamine hits from shorts has a brain altering chemistry, yeah we can alter our own brains through reward treatment, to have a shorter attention span lowering the capacity for learning and excelling in a particular study or course.
It's almost like the Fediverse isn't Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley isn't the Fediverse, but instead they're two different groups of people with some overlap, but vastly different goals.
There's still life on the Fediverse? I figured everyone had migrated to Nostr by now. Except perhaps the people running their little fiefdoms getting their dopamine hits every time they de-federate another server.
The whole ecosystem makes Meta and Twitter look like bastions of free speech by comparison.
It was a worthwhile experiment, but one whose outcome was "we have to do this at the protocol level if we actually want it to work."
I don't know about you, but every time I've looked at Nostr, I've just run in to low-quality anymous cryptospam and other distasteful things. While on fedi, my feed has been filled with nice people from the start. Maybe the problem with Nostr is that you can't really pick a starting point like you can with a Fediverse instance, combined with it attracting a certain kind of person.
Well yes.. I don't agree with antisemitism, homophobia and white supremacy, and I would categorize someone who espouses such values as a Nazi. Further I would categorize any platform that caters to Nazis and considers the presence of Nazis on the platform a feature as a "Nazi bar." I'm glad you understand.
Hey, PeerTube is already open source, and works on ActivityPub:
https://joinpeertube.org/
this article is sort of clickbaity
Note, https://loops.video/ splash page doesn't even have any content, just a sign up.
"...interested testers will be emailed when it’s possible to actually start using the new app..."
kinda seems fishy.
Note, PeerTube is functional - you can watch and download videos on it today!