• Fediverse

Out of the Loop(s)

Published on November 4th, 2024, 1061 words, 4 minutes to read

Loops, a TikTok alternative by Daniel Supernault (creator of Pixelfed), has been launched into closed beta and has been back in the news recently. In this post, I talk about why the fediverse doesn't need a TikTok alternative or why it won't even work out in the first place.

Incompatible mindsets

The fediverse is growing, and a more diverse set of people is on here, many people for different reasons. However, many people tend to come over here to escape the irrelevant content fed by the over-optimized algorithms and the increased tendency of social networks not to be social anymore.

TikTok and similar video short-form video platforms/features work entirely against this. They mainly work to show exactly what you'd be enticed to watch algorithmically, and the ability to quickly swipe to the next video in case you don't like it, allows you to keep yourself in its grasp.

While a lot of people on text-based platforms also are mostly here to read and share, the ratio of the creator to the consumer is way bigger there. Creators is another large part that I'll get to.

People making the content

With the fediverse growing, more creators have been coming here or even freshly sprung from here, which is great. Of course, a new platform might spawn new talents in the video creation space, but "a few" isn't going to cut it, if most people stay consuming then content on TikTok-likes is going to dry out quickly.

Where does this assumption come from? Simple, another platform alternative that has been around for ages already: PeerTube.

PeerTube has been around for a long time and it has been getting better with every release, but there never was a big move towards it and we barely have any creators solely pushing out content on a PeerTube instance. And the fediverse-centric People who produce web video content upload theirs on YouTube.

Why? Because of the two main incentives: Reach and money.

Video content takes time, I assume that people would want others to see their videos too. On the fediverse, reach is minimal. It highly depends on the content being shared, the proper hashtags to be used so that someone miraculously stumbles upon it, etc. On YouTube, you still share your video on other platforms, but there's this high likelihood that your content matches what other people like and they get it recommended on the platform itself. Besides many people on the fediverse oppose the word "algorithm", recommendation algorithms don't work across the protocol either.

Time is also money, and of course, there are a lot of people who do it for the fun of it and enjoy sharing their knowledge or creations. This becomes a commitment that some might want to get compensated for. The large platforms do have programs like these with ads and pay for x amount of views, which also makes it less likely that we have larger creators that might be fed up with those platforms to move to the fediverse.

Hosting is expensive

Speaking of the monetary aspect, video hosting is one of the most expensive types of hosting. It needs an immense amount of storage, which can turn quite pricey rather quickly, and if the platform has to transcode, then you also need a lot of computing depending on your size.

If a lot of people end up hosting Loops and videos and users spread out evenly then this doesn't end up as an issue, but with the code currently being closed source there is no telling how easy it is to self-host or how many people end up doing it.

The software is not the problem

Generally, people building ActivityPub counterparts to software is not the problem. It's nice even! However, in the case of TikTok, it doesn't make sense because of the societal and community aspects, mentioned above. Federated video platforms haven't worked out in the last almost decade of the fediverse (in which PeerTube) was around, and I don't think that Loops has the potential to change this.

Speaking of software...

Serial fedipreneur, dansup

I don't want to get too personal in this blog post, but it's worth mentioning. At most, I am impressed by the sheer amount of projects that dansup manages to push out. Most of them to the benefit of the Fediverse, like Pixelfed, FediDB and others.

But the other side of the medal isn't too nice. The title "fedipreneur" doesn't come from anywhere after all. Whenever there is some niche to claim, dansup is there to announce a project for it, and "beta starts next month" becomes a meme rather quickly. Aside from the already launched projects, there are sup., an encrypted fediverse messenger, (beta launching "later that month" in August 2023, beta not launched yet) and PubKit, an ActivityPub testing suite (also announced sometime last year, is in closed beta currently, according to the site at least).

Just the idea of these projects is already cool in itself and I'm personally really excited by something like PubKit (even though easy-to-use DIY solutions like Fedify exist nowadays, to bridge that gap). I do however think that dansup is putting too much on his plate. These projects don't have dedicated teams, he's the only person working on them with irregular contributions from others (ex. Pixelfed has 11k commits at the time of writing, 9700 are by dansup). Burnout can happen quickly and with the low prospect of some of these newer ideas working out (like sup. and Loops), I think it'd be better to focus on Pixelfed and FediDB to get the best out of these two projects.

I understand the struggle of wanting to be the one to move things forward if no one else does the first step, but this is unhealthy on more than one level.

While closed beta-induced FOMO is currently driving numbers high, I don't think this will carry itself for long. This and the above reasons are why I don't think that Loops is here to stay, or at least become a meaningful part of the Fediverse.

Maybe I'm super wrong though and it ends up going better than I think. Who knows.

Only time will tell!