Given the situation with TikTok—marked by censorship and the app’s recent control by MAGA-aligned interests—I checked Reddit to see what TikTok users are saying. It turns out many are asking for alternatives. Most replies suggest other proprietary apps, and I haven’t seen any recommendations for decentralized platforms like LOOPS and others from the Fediverse.
In my opinion, we now have a small but critical window of opportunity to introduce people to the Fediverse. We need to go where young people are—Reddit, Instagram, or whatever platforms they use—and explain the basics of decentralization and why choosing another proprietary app will only lead to the same outcome. LOOPS is easy to join and feels exactly like Tiktok.
I had the chance to discuss this topic with my college students just last semester. Young people are not the “imbeciles” mainstream media often portrays them to be. They see what’s happening and want to participate in change. I am firmly convinced that they are a key component of the social revolution we need, and that with their help, we could dismantle the GAFAM economy in just a few weeks.
So I believe we have to seize this moment: share, explain, and promote the Fediverse wherever you can—especially in the coming days—because every invitation is a step toward a truly free and user-owned internet.
To the moon!
It truly is! I’m seeing some politicians move away from X, gamers away from Windows, now the TikTok exodus. A ray of hope in these troubled times.
Good idea, how do you propose we do this
Oh, I just realized I’ve sent my reply to the wrong comment lol. Check out, my reply to frongt, it was intended for you.
Sorry if this isn’t allowed, it’s maybe not strictly fediverse but I like skylight from Bluesky. Bsky has a lot of public figures and brands which I think is a necessary evil in pulling critical mass in times where an exodus is occurring because of political censorship. I tried skylight on iOS and it’s fine. Obviously not the same grade of content as the TikTok/reels/shorts but after linking my bsky account with already curated feeds of my interests I find that it combines them in an easily digestible way. Hopefully some big content creators explore their options because they do exist and are ready to be used.
I don’t see why this wouldn’t be allowed, this is the Fedi, it’s open to various opinions.
My problem with this is the same with all the proprietary platforms, the only thing that matters is the amount of money it can bring to investors. So when Bluesky gets popular enough, some rich douche will make sure to gain control over it and use it as a propaganda machine for the right, it’s just a matter of time.
That’s a very good point. Hopefully the underlying openness of the AT protocol enables homebrewed alternatives where you can simply port your account over, though the threat of this seems like a non-issue for activity pub from the start.
I’ve just installed the loops beta on iOS. I don’t really care for short form video content in general but here’s to hoping open social media can become more mainstream.
I’ve just installed the loops beta on iOS. I don’t really care for short form video content in general but here’s to hoping open social media can become more mainstream.
Same. Not my bag but if we can get a peak in registrations, that might help to promote the app.
I think they’ve really missed the ball not having Loops do some kind of soft re-launch this week. We’ve known the changeover was coming, there probably won’t be a better moment than this to tell anyone “Hey, Loops is an alternative if you’re leaving”. Not having a ready to download app in any store, even F-Droid, is such a shame, and short form video makes more sense on worse platforms like a mobile phone. (I’m observing, not complaining too much - it’s not like I rolled up my sleeves and contributed.)
For anyone that wants to make videos, every category is wide open. If you’re making anything compelling (outside maybe Linux and politics), there’s not much competition. Claim your spots now.
If anyone that makes videos on Loops reads this: I’m begging you, please put captions on your videos. Most of my ‘doomscrolling on the phone’ time doesn’t happen in situations where turning the volume up is convenient/appropriate.
Funny that you say that, as Loops just posted to their Kickstarter and blog on Thursday that Loops is in the App Store, and no longer beta!
Hopefully that drives up some engagement.
Yeah, I saw. Really good! Also saw that F-Droid should be soon, and that sign ups have spiked. The content on there has already improved slighly in the last handful of days. There’s hope for it!
That’s the problem, since open source projects have no stable income and no profit incentive, there’s no one person to make tactical, executive decisions for the good of the project like these. I’m saying this because if open source ever wants to become a serious, competitive alternative (ie. have people turn to it out of convenience (90% of ppl) and not ideology or foresight (10% of ppl)), this is a weakness it’s going to have to engineer a solution to. I genuinely think you have to play the game to beat the game.
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Why isn’t the fediverse more popular? At futurology.today we have the benefit of also moderating r/futurology on reddit, which has 21.6 million subscribers. Out of the tens of thousands of people who’ve read our posts about the fediverse site, only a few hundred have signed up. Most of our subscribers are from elsewhere in the fediverse.
Regarding the Threadiverse in general, it seems that (1) many people find having to choose an instance first to be very confusing (not applicable to your situation I guess), (2) upon arrival these primarily Western people immediately see content proposing the murder of Westerners and demolition of the entire Western culture, whereupon they nope right back out (can you blame them?) and then complain bitterly about their toxic experiences here on other platforms, including Reddit and Bluesky and X.
Most of us forget how extensive our blocklists here have grown to be over time, and how much effort we put into Linux levels of tinkering to discover communities we like while blocking content we do not.
If I am wrong then please ignore me, but it’s a thought to consider.
Of course mostly it’s a network effect, so I am speaking about issues that we might actually be able to do something about.
Just checked my blocklist to remind myself and… yep. Yeah that’s a big blindspot for us, the pruning and curating of the space has to be done by hand. New users, and especially younger users, are often used to that being done for them by the platform itself.
The fediverse is like a massive yet untamed garden filled with various species, some beautiful, many poisonous. They don’t see gloves and shears and see opportunity, they see a chore.
Agreed.
It does not help that moderation reports do not federate among Lemmy instances. They do in PieFed, I don’t know about Mbin, but between Lemmy instances they do not, making the level of effort placed upon moderators really high by limiting the available pool to those on the same instance as the community.
It also does not help when instance admins protect those doing the bullying, such as hexbear admins that have even been caught lying to the admins of other instances, and refuse to police (i.e. ban) their own account holders as they constantly violate the rules on other instances. At that point, defederation becomes the only option left, except that many instances including yours are so high averse to defederations that instead the behaviors in question are essentially given carte blanche to continue without any means at all to stop it.
A fact that new visitors very much see - even if we old hands do not anymore, after having set up personal blocks aka blacklisting or otherwise view only Subscribed content aka exclude such via our whitelisting procedure. And new users that see what we have chosen to forget exists here go back and tell others about how unfriendly this place was to them.
So long as we leave the vast majority of the moderation burden on the individual user themselves, the Threadiverse is not going to grow and instead will continue to shrink. i.e. all the weeds are choking the garden.
Does defederating from hexbear also require defederating from other instances thar federate with hexbear?
No? Life is rarely binary.
For instance PieFed.zip both does not defederate with hexbear while at the same time not exposing new users to them unawares by placing a user-level block (which unlike Lemmy’s actually stops showing all content from those users) upon new account creation but then explains to the user how to remove that at any time. This makes interactions with them opt-in rather than have to discover it and be opt-out, so I consider it ideal. (Although I haven’t tested how that would show up to users browsing without an account - that might be a loophole.)
Or, a true opt-out solution could place a message underneath every post from that instance explaining how users are known to be combative, arguing in bad faith for “the dunk” and extremely likely to break your own instance’s rules and not conform to generally accepted standards of behavior. Something similar is done for Beehaw on PieFed.social, using that community’s own exact wording and linking to their ToS that differs greatly from the norm. However, I would wager that virtually all 3rd party apps would ignore this.
Defederation is not a first resort, it is rather the last one and for Lemmy, literally the only one provided when instance admins refuse to enforce both the rules of others and even their own stated ones (to keep trolling inside the community yet do not spread it to others WITHOUT CONSENT). Defederation from hexbear is not punitive - even members of hexbear have expressed a desire to defederate themselves from the outside world, to avoid all this drama - but rather protective of the wider Threadiverse overall, for new members to feel more comfortable joining us here.
Got it. Thanks for the answer!
The way I understand the ActivityPyb protocol, it is Publisher/Subscriber paradigm. That means when you federate with another instance, you receive (Subscribe to) the things they Publish, and they subscribe to the things Hexbear publishes. So they don’t “reblog” Hexbear just because they receive Hexbear content. Their users would have to deliberately reshare the content in some way (on Kbin/Mbin, this is done by Boosting, on Mastodon it’s Resharing, etc etc).
Oh, okay. Got it.
Thanks for the answer!
I follow communities and have no blocklist. I just read hot of subscribed.
Personally I think IPFS or similar will be a better solution to decentralised video, federation seems inefficient for it, but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
Shame the US gov killed LBRY, that seemed kinda promising too.
Oh, yeah. Loops recently started doing a recommended algorithm and I haven’t opened it up for a while to see how that’s going. Cuz my two main issues with it has been a lack of variety in content due to the low user count, and the complete inability to find anything I might actually like.
Yeah, there’s just not enough people using Loops. :(
One thing I don’t like about loops is that in their page they only prominently link to the main instance. Other instances are listed all the way to the footer. They don’t even try to decentralize it and it kinda sucks
It’s like 20 years past time.
The alternatives to many of these services should be nothing
Unfortunately that’s just not how people work. I hate Tiktok and never used it, but I still want Loops to do well so people can have a far healthier and privacy-considerate service. There are many inventions huamns have made that do harm instead of good, but we have to learn how to minimize what we can as we depend on them. Forcing people to “not have Tiktok-like services” is not a solution.
Yea it is
For real. It feels like we are trying to sell people heroin as a less addictive alternative to morphine.
Exactly, fediverse tikrok gives a lot of “eco-friendly cigarette” vibes.
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it was already known it was going to happen, tiktok was bought to stop any anti-israeli protests, and anti-conservative movement, since they originally were licking trumps arse.
Yes. The structure of the deal, with 20% revenue royalty, in addition to 20% ownership, leaves 0 possible chance of any profit. Only Zionist supremacist control of media can be motive.
Truth is, fediverse’s more fragile than people wanna Admit, that’s my opinion from using it for a week. Firstly, everything works on grants and donations, there’s no for profit model that’s running these servers. That’s bad because running social media is expensive.
Second fediverse’s still utility first, user experience second priority. there’s no recommendation algorithm on mastodon or most other fediverse servers.
Third, this is coming from a security stand point, fediverse is vulnerable to both centralised architecture, and decentralised architecture attacks.
Also it’s just, for 90% of people, if they want to have a website like tiktok, they will just go to tiktok. Especially in case of tiktok. Very few people want to try stuff that’s not as fully baked as corporate owned social media
Everything you said was spot on, and all of it is by design. The engineers and operators of the fediverse intentionally built their systems to be community-funded, algorithm-free, oriented around the tech-savvy, and otherwise deliberately eschewing the design principles behind corpo social media. None of that was an accident, it was the whole point.
So for people asking “when is the fediverse gonna create a competitor to tik tok” the answer is “never” because it was never its intent to do that. The friction is a feature, not a bug.
Yeah, without a recommendation engine, or a for profit model, fediverse is destined to stay an enthusiast space.
Which to be honest? Is totally fine with me. Re-diversifying the Internet is a good thing.
I mean, I too prefer being on lemmy over reddit. I was just wondering about the EUs current push for open source alternatives, if they can ever succeed in their pursuit.
Oh so NOW the insane censorship and fake news spreading on TikTok are an issue? In my opinion nothing changed. No matter if it‘s OG TikTok or US TikTok. They stand for the same authoritarian ideas. I guess it just hits closer to home for Americans now but it‘s essentially the same rotten thing it always was.
Which of course is not to say you shouldn‘t get off TikTok no matter where you are. Please do and believe me you won‘t even need replacement for doom scrolling brainrot. You can live perfectly without it.
This has always been an issue. I’m just saying that now there’s an opportunity to bring people to the Fediverse.
One thing, though: I’m getting tired of the negative comments about it. I’m trying to educate people in whatever small ways I can, hoping to make a modest positive impact in this dystopian world.
