In the last few months i really gotten into the whole Fediverse thing, but i noticed that, despite it being the most popular Social Media Platform, there isn't a TikTok alternative. I know there is Loops, but it's not open source or federated yet, so it's not really an option. Why is that?

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[–] gencha@lemm.ee 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nobody pays for that much bandwidth without the ability to manipulate you through profiling and impressions. You are the product. The product is not sharing videos. There is no fediverse platform that makes you its whore. If you were to make a video sharing platform, it would never work, because that is not the product, it's only a feature of what makes up the dopamine machine.

Lemmy will also never outgrow commercial platforms, because the commercial platforms also never were about content.

[–] anthony@lemmy.cif.su 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nobody pays for that much bandwidth without the ability to manipulate you through profiling and impressions. You are the product. The product is not sharing videos. There is no fediverse platform that makes you its whore. If you were to make a video sharing platform, it would never work, because that is not the product, it's only a feature of what makes up the dopamine machine.

I mean, video streaming platforms already exist as part of the fediverse (Peertube) so i would disagree on you with you on that one.

[–] gencha@lemm.ee 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

That's a good point, and I don't really have enough insights to properly respond to that. I did think about Peertube, and I believe that a site like TikTok is different, because it relies on the ability to broadcast a large number of short videos, specifically with lots of skips.

Streaming one video for several minutes, and skipping between numerous videos every couple of seconds, is orders of magnitude more expensive. Video compression works on the idea that you store entire pictures rarely, and then just encode the difference between each frame. When you constantly need the start of videos, you constantly need the full picture of the first frame. This induces a much higher bandwidth requirement than with video that streams for several minutes continuously. Also consider the response time that is required to make the TikTok experience work. Then also consider that you need to attract enough content contributors to make this work. You can't just upload some ancient archive of 45 minute videos. You need to drive the machine.

So, to produce a TikTok experience, you also need to design for an attractive ingress of free content.

This is just not replicable in a free environment.

[–] anthony@lemmy.cif.su 1 points 3 hours ago

Streaming one video for several minutes, and skipping between numerous videos every couple of seconds, is orders of magnitude more expensive. Video compression works on the idea that you store entire pictures rarely, and then just encode the difference between each frame. When you constantly need the start of videos, you constantly need the full picture of the first frame. This induces a much higher bandwidth requirement than with video that streams for several minutes continuously. Also consider the response time that is required to make the TikTok experience work.

Yeah, it would probably have to load the next 5-10 Videos in advance, and probably even continue sharing the last 5-10 to make the torrenting work properly. And the bandwidth use would be even higher this way... It would be possible to use even more advanced compression algorithms than TikTok, but that would require more performance on the clients end, and therefore lock out a lot of old and cheap devices.