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.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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.

[–] Metasyntactic -4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Srsly. Video hosting aint cheap.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

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