Here’s an idea. How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely, and stop rewarding them with excessive device permissions and personal data.
How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely
In my day, we listened to AM Talk Radio! 16 hours a day, to and from work! None of this prissy little short form phone slop, no sir. It was three hour long shifts of Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht, and Sean Hannity. I earned my hate honestly, by fiddling with a little dial on my walkman and getting five commercials about cigars and dick pills every eight minutes. I got to hear bad riff tracks about how Japan was taking over our economy produced on a AKAI S900 that had been dropped down a flight of stairs. I didn’t know these people even had faces until Limbaugh showed up as a talking head for the NFL for a few months.
The very fucking idea that these stupid petulant spoiled woke lib fuck-around find-out kids are getting their news from a five minute long vertical visual display? OOOOOOOOoh it makes me SO MAD! I hate 'dem kids. I hate’m!!!
Are these people unaware that YouTube Shorts is a thing?
I am and that is why I actively avoid.
No, they are just keenly aware that YouTube Shorts is shit by comparison.
Literally anything but FOSS, huh?
Out of the frying pan and into a cold frying pan.
Larry Ellison tool over Tiktok to stifle anti israel and pro Palestine voices and the NPCs thought it was all about China.
Told you so.
An Australian app, so you can say “Epstein” on this one but still not “stop the genocide and colonisation of Palestine”. At least the hate speech manager (for now) isn’t an ex-IDF Zionist and the platform (for now) is not expressly pro-Israel / pro-genocide.
Isn’t upscrolled created by a Palestinian? I doubt he’d be okay with censoring a genocide against his people.
Is this like UpDog?
What’s UpDog?
not much, how 'bout you?
This made me lol
41k new users in 4 days? Not too bad, but certainly not a mass exodus. Tiktok’s user base is quite large, although I don’t know the US specific user base size. It is a shame people don’t choose better alternatives though.
Tiktok’s user base is quite large
875 million to over 950 million daily active users (DAU) globally as of Jan 2026.
It is a shame people don’t choose better alternatives though.
TikTok was the better alternative. That’s half the joke. As soon as it caught on, the plutocrats stepped in and seized control
Not unlike how Facebook bought out and gutted Instagram or JP Morgan took over Reddit and cleaned out all the lefties before taking it public.
That’s before you get into the marketing budget that social media needs to build the kind of massive userbase you’re asking for.
Oh come on. Another centralised social media service that could be compromised. Wtf is wrong with these people
99% don’t know what the Fediverse is. I can’t blame them for jumping ship to Upscrolled since it’s what they have heard of.
At least they are showing a willingness to move
They follow what is advertised. Fediverse, by its nature, doesn’t have money for this. There was a push for Mastodon, though.
When you say there was a push, do you mean there was a time when they did have ads, or do you mean the community push with the twitter troubles?
The community push, mainly. But there seemed to be a PR campaign to capitalize on it. I don’t know if there were official adverts.
Ah okay, that was my understanding as well. I was curious if anyone had tried making an ad.
I think it’s hard to host a video-focused social media on the fediverse, I imagine it would have a high cost to maintain.
Also PeerTube
oh damn, I didn’t notice it is open source at first
It wasn’t for a while.
good to know, thanks for the info
Build it on top of Bittorrent. If you like a post, you’re seeding it. When you want to stop seeding it, your like goes away.
Then popular things will have a large pool of seeds mitigating much of the bandwidth cost to the instance host.
With the side effect of making manipulating the voting algorithm with bots a lot more expensive.
I think people would be pretty quickly upset by the batter and storage drain from this. I have to imagine if picking an instance is a barrier to mastodon, most folks are not interested enough to learn the mechanics of why likes suddenly use system resources, and see it as a failing of the app.
Plus the network usage for people with data caps, ISPs who throttle you for any p2p traffic etc it’d be a mess. Not to mention torrents usually have a ‘ramp up’ time as they find and connect to peers, probably not what people used to and endless stream of autoplaying short-form videos would want.
I don’t see any other choices other than:
- You host it yourself. (Peer to Peer social media)
- You pay someone else to host it for you. (Instanced social media)
- You trade your digital freedom, privacy and political stability of your country to someone else to host it for you. (Meta, X, TikTok)
3 hasn’t been working out so far and people really don’t want to have to pay another subscription. So you can spend your battery life and data instead. Maybe setup the service so that other people can seed on your behalf, so you could use your own resources or pay for someone elses all in the same ecosystem.
Peertube does a similar thing, using bittorrent to share the load, but it only works while you’re actively watching the video so outside of very popular videos it is usually just the instance who is providing bandwidth. By tying the data sharing directly into the primary interaction method it creates a much larger pool of peers and, eventually, once everyone stops seeding it the data stops existing.
No permanent record of everything you’ve ever posted, no central repository of data to be hoovered up by the AI startup who pays off the instance owner, no empowering a single person to control all of social media for their own selfish ends.
I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.
I think instanced makes the most sense, and even that would be a hard ask if popularity every spikes.
I think the fact that Peertube which I think of as more a PC interface, where bandwidth and power consumption are less an issue, but still chooses to limit the peer connections to active watching speaks to how discordant the idea is with what people expect from streaming media.
I would happily use a desktop app as you described, so if it ever exists, let me know 😁
I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.
The tech is already most of the way there.
Consider this.
There is already a type of community that has developed sets of rules and incentive structures such that they have created a distributed service with petabytes of storage for content and gigabits of excess bandwidth for delivery.
This service is in such demand that people will voluntarily study for and take a test (waiting hours in line for their 1 on 1 interview/test). This is in addition to their buying/renting their own storage and bandwidth and adding it to the pool that comprises this service. Much more work than plugging a phone in to charge!
What I’m describing is a private bittorrent tracker community.
They’ve created a scalable, peer to peer, media storage and retrieval service (for public domain videos and music, which are the best) where you’re required to contribute AT LEAST as much as you take (1.0 share ratio).
In addition, by publicly displaying the upload/download statistics about a user’s account it has turned into a source of social credit. People seed massively in excess of what they will every download in order to have the highest ratio. The social systems and norms are aligned with the good of the service.
People love the high ratio people, after all everyone loves downloading a 85GB 4k HDR+ copy of It’s a Wonderful Life at 15gbps, that’s only possible because Joe Ratio has a seedbox on a 50Gb connection serving up classic movies(super classic and old) for clout.
You don’t even have to worry about having movies downloaded in advance when you can just have your seedbox grab your favorite Charlie Chaplain movie and have it available for streaming directly from the seedbox in less time than it takes to grab a glass of water.
Take the model of a public tracker and create a decentralized messaging system around it (I think there is one or two projects like that already floating around but the names escape me). Bittorrent already has a distributed hash table (DHT) service which can completely replace a centrally hosted tracker or run along-side hosted trackers.
You are also right that it would have to be easy, but that’s possible. Signal has some of the most advanced encryption systems available but to the average user it’s just text messaging. There are some talented frontend developers and UX designers out there but that’s not my lane and I have confidence in them.
It’s a neat idea to think about, at least
I am aware of private trackers. I guess to me, even in the space of “it’s neat to think about” something like Loops and built on activity pub makes more sense.
Now if we imagined folks offering home hardware or ‘seed boxes’ to help an instance out, that I could see being useful tech, but constantly uploading from your phone seems a bit silly.
Yeah how come they won’t hop to a tankie filled content desert that is Lemmy? Where else will they find Facebook memes and US politics?
Well because why would someone look at Lemmy as a TikTok replacement
Is “remain ‘impartial’ to political agendas” a dogwhistle for “tolerates Nazis” or have I just become too cynical
No you’re not too cynical. You’re paying attention
TikTokers. thought i had the best weed. blocked 1000s of bot accounts on facebook. trying to cause a buffer overflow. they pera-booted me with no discussion. no timeout anymore. never saw an ad in 10 years
Wow the ads for this app keep appearing! It will be another blue sky in less than a year
So, better than TikTok?
They’re leaving like redditors to Lemmy. There’s dozens of them!
It’s more like Twitter to BlueSky, which was a pinch more.
… and just resets the cycle
OK, but currently it’s at least in the (relatively) good phase of the cycle
Not federated. Nothing stops this app from getting worse in the future, right?
I trust my palestinian brother who created it
If they’re brown, they can’t let you down.
Well, Kanye never fails to entertain…
Idpol in a nutshell
I wish we had a good term to describe making assumptions about how an individual will behave based only on their nationality, race, or ethnicity.
There is always Loops
No one uses loops. That Dan dude went all in on such a silly thing. Won’t be surprised if itit dies in two years or becomes a zombie project.
You get to watch a couple of videos only without logging in. No search.
Yikes.
Sadly no way to host your own instance yet, but it does look promising.
The git repo has a server installation guide.
IIRC that’s old news and you can now self host and there are other instances up.
Is there any discovery or list of other instances?
There already are quite a few instances actually, but they’re all trash tier for now, except for the dev-operated loops.video
Ahh the topic for zero Lemmy/Fediverse fucks given.
