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] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Conceivably you could open source the algorithm, or even better, have a variety of algorithms to choose from with custom parameters.

In a similar vein, I'm not sure if anyone remembers Slacker Radio, but it was a competitor to Pandora/Spotify/etc. It had its drawbacks (hence why it isn't around anymore), but I absolutely loved the amount of control you had when building custom stations. You'd first seed a custom station with a bunch of musicians you like, and then there were a number of parameters which allowed you to fine-tune the algorithm to a remarkable extent, well beyond what today's music apps offer.

I'd love to get to a place where we have options other than just saying "welp the algorithm" and just giving up, I think that the ability to customize one's algos would be a killer feature that the fediverse can offer which the major platforms generally won't.

[–] Jumper775 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You could probably run such an algorithm locally by logging data locally then determining a type of video which could then be requested from the server. On top of that to get even more data privacy you could store the data collected for this as different numbers in a 3d array or other data structure and then use some form of math to determine what would be best based on that so any personally identifiable information will be really obfuscated and nearly impossible to use for anything other than the algorithm it’s designed to be used by. This would then allow users to not only fine tune their own personal algorithm parameters, but could open the door for allowing people to write their own algorithms or systems to do this.

might be a good idea for someone to make such a thing as TikTok has been getting closer and closer to getting banned in more and more places. There may very well be a twitter-like opportunity for someone with such an app to swoop in and gain some market share