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] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Solid response.

What the heck does that have to do with watching viral videos on cell phones? We’re talking about a competitor to TikTok. With respect, Linux is like 3% of the desktop market, anything happening on Linux endpoints is noise to the big players.

The bitTorrent protocol is infamous for piracy, in fact you'll hardly find a common man who doesn't equate the two together (hearing torrents = pirated media) Even with the full copyright cartel doing their damnest, it's still available world wide. Also, video streaming on mobile data is everywhere and ISPs responded by fattening up their networks with newer, better, faster tech, like 4g/5g.

Your concerns are reasonable, though there is no precedent. Might be, might not be. Hard to say when one lacks the rulebook.

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

video streaming on mobile data is everywhere and ISPs responded by fattening up their networks with newer, better, faster tech, like 4g/5g

Yeah, but streaming from your phone to a streaming service, or whatever, hands over the job of distribution to the streaming service.

Streaming may be 'everywhere' but how many phones are streaming at any given moment? 0.01%? It's probably not even that many. Now how many are watching TikTok? How much more bandwidth would they need if the TikTok client was also serving videos to other TikTok clients?

Now, could you obfuscate the video with encryption, etc. to make it nearly impossible for cell phone companies to stop it? Probably. But, you'd need the cooperation of the Google Play & Apple stores to make that happen (on non-rooted devices), and it seems likely they would take the side of their cell provider partners.