Kinda funny to read all these comments looking at a single-person's effort and going "he, he, he cannot win against the adtech billions and their addiction machines".
What Pixelfed (and Loops and various other still half baked initiatives) prove is that there is an entire space of very interesting applications that are possible with the technologies of here and now. Bluesky was better resourced but essentially still in the same dwarf category versus big adtech.
Some people will take these proof-of-principle efforts to heart and build a beautiful future while others will cling on milking the totally broken paradigms of yesteryear.
I don't see anyone actually saying the "he, he," part. It's more "oof,". Nobody's happy with the situation, but it is what it is.
> Some people will [...] build a beautiful future
Hope so.
I'm sure TikTok and Facebook won't live forever. But I think they will not be overtaken by "tiktok, only distributed". Horses were not made obsolete by mechanical horses and all that. But that's just nitpicking.
The "distributed" part is still to pinned down anyway (which architecture scales and which not, under what definition of "scaling"). The discussions between activitypub and atproto protocol folks are informative in this respect.
But there is another non-trivial difference: these are open source projects.
The real Achilles heel is having a viable business model. But all business models, whether good or bad are inventions. Unless we think predatory adtech is the end of human ingenuity people will come up with ways.
> The real Achilles heel is having a viable business model.
Other activitypub projects are going well with a small minority of people donating the server costs, and project leaders just keeping those servers there because they want it.
I’m working on it.. to me distributed or decentralized or anything tech-y doesn’t matter. What matters is the masses, the common man and at the end of the day, the masses don’t care or know about that stuff. They want to be entertained and maybe they even want to help. Create simple but powerful user experiences. Make them addictive and productive and then you have something that can actually help society
Professional content creators need to get paid reasonably. AFAIR Tik Tok spent a lot of money getting good content creators in the beginning. YouTube and X pay peanuts but due to scale it's a significant amount of peanuts for top earners.
The platform is important but the content creators and the viewers are 10x more important.
Tiktok paid peanuts but had a large enough audience to get lots of attention. The money on Tiktok comes from brands being marketed (often via product placement), not necessarily from Tiktok itself. Tiktok does pay people, but not nearly as much as you'd think with how many influences are out there.
I don't think the existing product placement industry will suffer on alternatives, but Tiktok has what its competition lacks: an excellent algorithm, not bogged down by any ethics, optimised for pulling in as many people as possible. Filtering out ugly or disabled people and algorithmically censoring speech all across the spectrum would never pass on any open system, but it has worked wonders on Tiktok.
That's why I don't think open source alternatives will ever be popular, even if they find themselves backed by investors and paying out creators: they're still too ethical to be profitable.
Some extension of the Patreon model onto decentralised social media could work. I pay a few bucks a month to the creators of webcomics and other content that I enjoy, just because it's the right thing to do, and I dunno, it makes me feel more connected to these people that I've never met but who bring me some joy?
I disagree. YouTube is absolutely filled to the brim with Patreon supported content. Even large channels need significant alternative income streams like merch to exist in the way they do, and they're still profitable. A sliver of the viewership cares enough to pay, but when you reach hundreds of thousands of people, you don't need all of them to pay for you to be profitable.
We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore.
> YouTube is absolutely filled to the brim with Patreon supported content.
Tell me how many of these content creators are exclusively supported by Patreon.
Also, ask any of these content creators (that supposedly are able to be sustained by Patreon) if they would be willing to move away from YouTube and into another platform like Peertube.
None of them will. Some of them won't mind creating the Peertube channel and distributing their content as well, but no one will leave YouTube, because they all know that YouTube is still the platform that enables all the economy to exist.
I'm not saying this because I don't like the Patreon model. Quite the opposite. [0]. But it's hard to argue with numbers, and the numbers are just not in favor of this idea that a whole industry can be supported by a minority of enthusiasts.
Regarding your first question, it’s a bit of a trick question because no one is purposefully demonetizing their videos even though the ad revenue is relatively low, but Adrian Black from Adrian’s Digital Basement came to mind as someone that is supported almost exclusively by Patreon. He never does sponsors on his channel, only makes money from Patreon and a bit from ad revenue from YouTube, and specifically thanks to his Patreon income was able to quit his tech job and go full time in YouTube.
LGR is another one that comes to mind that I think barely ever does sponsors and makes most of his income from Patreon. I’m sure there are many others as well.
Can we get them out of YouTube and onto their own PeerTube server?
Not a rhetorical question. If there is anyone that is not dependent of YouTube's revenue and already amassed enough supporters, is there anything holding them to Google?
I feel like the main thing would be discoverability. If they’re not showing up in people’s recommended they’ll have significantly lower viewership which could ultimately affect their Patreon income over time.
They’re both techie enough to set one up, so I feel like the best approach if they were interested would be to set it up as a mirror and see how it goes with traffic. That way they’re at least not beholden 100% to YouTube for their livelihood.
Another thing that just came to mind, how is discoverability of PeerTube in search results compared to YouTube? I wouldn’t be surprised if Google promotes YouTube links over PeerTube in search results which could also have a big impact.
> I feel like the main thing would be discoverability.
"Hey everyone, big update! I'm leaving YouTube and moving my channel to PeerTube. You can follow me at @myusername@myserver. My last video on this channel will be a quick tutorial showing how PeerTube works and why it's better than YouTube. See you there soon!"
> If they’re not showing up in people’s recommended they’ll have significantly lower viewership which could ultimately affect their Patreon income over time.
Why? If they already have a substantial amount of patrons, surely they are not worried about pleasing the algorithm. They can live off solely off their fans who support them directly. Right? Right??
> I feel like the best approach if they were interested would be to set it up as a mirror and see how it goes with traffic.
Ahem, which part of "Some of them won't mind creating the Peertube channel and distributing their content as well, but no one will leave YouTube, because they all know that YouTube is still the platform that enables all the economy to exist." did you miss in my original comment?
Sorry about the caustic response. I'm just tired of wishful thinking passing for grounded reasoning. When/if you find me one creator brave enough to put moral principles over their own livelihood by leaving YouTube, then I'll accept that Patreon alone is a viable alternative. Until then, it's just signaling and posturing.
Without knowing what percentage of revenue is from Youtube and what percentage is from Patreon, this isn't really important. You can get 10% of income from Patreon and still be considered "Patreon supported."
> We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore.
> Not every product needs to be at the 100m user scale to be a success.
But the absolute overwhelming majority of content creators are putting all the work with the hopes of achieving that scale of success.
> The nice thing about this era for a creator is that having 10,000 dedicated fans is enough.
For one creator, yes. For a whole economy that can bring billions of dollars per year, you will need to have a much larger consumer base, and you'll need to have a substantial part of them willing to support a lot more than a handful of creators.
Maybe professional content creators don't need to exist at all. I look at people like PewDiePie and MrBeast and I wonder if society really needs anything that makes those men possible.
You are looking at the extreme end of the bell curve and think they represent the totality of the group.
For every Mr. Beast, there are tens of thousands of other people with 10k-1M subscribers who produce valuable content which would never exist if it were not for the already existing audience.
I chose those names because they are a pure distillation of "everything that is wrong..." But it's pretty easy to find lots of issues that wouldn't exist if "digital media content creator" wasn't a job that kids today are aspiring to.
Look at video thumbnails and "YouTube face". Look at how many videos are feature-film length ordeals: there is no way everyone is actively watching all that content; they're all putting it in their TVs in the background. Look at how every video on YouTube is at least 10 minutes long: that happens because it means the video will get a second ad spot. If it comes down to making a 9.5 minute video it a 10.1 minute one, well, nobody is going to pass up stretching an extra 36 seconds out of the B-roll.
If you're an advertiser, it's gotta be driving you mad. All this micro-optimizing for length to get ad spots has to be really destroying their click through rates. Which is fine with me, actually, cry me big crocodile years. But it's probably also why they've spent so much effort on in-video sponsorships. Now that really pisses me off, because I'm paying YouTube for an ad-free experience and yet YouTube turns a blind eye to its content creators circumventing my preference.
But all of this would go away if YouTube didn't pay content creators. "Why shouldn't people get paid for their work?" They should. But posting to YouTube shouldn't be someone's job. Because the remuneration system is perverse.
> But posting to YouTube shouldn't be someone's job.
Why not? Should they instead be kissing someone else's ass to get an unpaid internship at some lawyer firm? Aiming to get a stable job at one of the Big 4 accounting firms? Helping big fat cats get even fatter by working on VC? Toiling at some farm? Taking care of our kids at salaries that barely affords them to live close to where they teach?
No one is being forced to do YouTube videos, and if that's what they are preferring to do, maybe it is better than the alternatives?
I said why not. Because the remuneration system is perverse.
The vast majority of people on YouTube are not going to make any money for what they post. I don't just mean "pocket change they wouldn't have had otherwise". I mean literally 0 dollars versus YouTube easily taking in millions over the long tail.
As an example, I'm one of these such creators. I have a few videos that have been up for a long time and in that time have gathered low 100k+ views.
If those views had all occurred in one month, YouTube would pay me somewhere around $2000. But because this happened over 10 years, YouTube has always said, "eh, you know what, it's not enough to bother."
I'm sorry, but in any other case, if someone wasn't paying me $200 a year that they owed me, I'd be pissed. But I digress, that's not the issue, and that's not why I post videos to YouTube.
The issue is that this is the case for the majority of content creators on YouTube. YouTube makes a massive amount of money by exploiting people's content that they will never pay 1 red cent for. For a lot of those people, they continue on because of a misguided dream that they might one day get to be they anointed few who gets to have their "fair" share of their content.
Through the revenue sharing model, YouTube has created a perverse incentive structure that pushes content creators to do things in ways they wouldn't otherwise have done, on a promise that is likely never to occur. YouTube creator shouldn't be a job not because I think YouTube creators should find "something better to do", but because YouTube is a shit company that shouldn't be allowed to operate the way they do.
Sorry, you previous post started complaining with "digital media content creator" in general, then you moved on to complain about YouTube.
If your problem is with the implementation from one company and not the whole idea, fine. But this is not an issue with the "revenue share" model.
Also:
> For a lot of those people, they continue on because of a misguided dream that they might one day get to be they anointed few who gets to have their "fair" share of their content.
It's not different from basketball/baseball/football players that spend all their young years working for free and expecting to become pro. Or musicians who get into pay-to-play circuits in the hopes of ever becoming the next star, or fashion models who endure all the crazy routine of a talent agency based on the dream of being as rich as Gisele Büdchen, and even to the batches of YC founders that are given 500k and are told "no, no, this money is not for you. This money is for you to try to make a billion dollar business. Your first priority is to make me even richer, not your well-being."
Yes, it is no different, and it's a problem. Football players and noodles are especially good examples. These are people who literally destroy their bodies on a promise that is oversold. So maybe the entire system should be done away with. If we can't have professional sports players and professional models and YouTube content creators without exploitation, then maybe we shouldn't have them at all. I dodn't see it as much different from not legalizing hard drugs like heroin. If the drug is too addictive to allow for responsible use, then we shouldn't have it at all.
If you follow some of the creators that got big in YouTube and are also now big in Tik Tok, you'll see that it's actually worse in Tik Tok. Unlike YouTube that distributed a percentage of revenue, Tik Tok has a flat "creators' fund" that gets doled out proportionally. So where a boy account on YouTube draws more revenue to YouTube, that makes the pie bigger, so pre-existing accounts aren't losing out just because someone else is doing better (e.g. they serve different demos). On Tik Tok, each account is not just in competition for existing eyeballs, they're in competition with all other accounts regardless of overlap of audience.
I think this is a large part of the problem with YouTube and the like. People seem to act like, because this isn't traditional media, then the creators must be more like us than them. Maybe that was true at the dawn of YouTube 15 - 20 years ago. But it's definitely not true now. The way these content creators work is a huge apparatus of media production indistinguishable from any other production studio in traditional media. Indeed, maybe if them even aspire to get into traditional media. Well, until they find out the raw deal the distribution companies want to give them, that is.
Leaving Tiktok and YouTube aside, viewing posters on Twitter as "content creators" would be dangerous. We don't want to judge tweets by the metric of whether they are the most engaging
Twitter never paid top tweeters. The X attempt at payouts seems to be yet another component of making the platform worse. Mind you, Vine collapsed over a dispute with its creators.
People happily post on Bluesky or HN for free. I think paid content is a different genre, and we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising.
> People happily post on Bluesky or HN for free. I think paid content is a different genre, and we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising.
I think this is so important and something that gets missed a lot, especially any place that is even tangentially related to "entrepreneurship" like HN. "Why wouldn't you try to monetize every single aspect of your life?"
I do wood working as a hobby. People keep asking me if I have plans to sell my stuff, then they look at me weird when I say no. Some of them even look like they've been personally insulted, which is weird considering I'm the one being pressed.
I do it because I can make nice things for my family and friends, unique things that have a lot of meaning to them. It's not possible to monetize what I do because what I do only works because it's not monetizable.
> we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising.
Sorry for the plug, but the two of us at https://stacker.news/ managed to get users to pay for content (even though it’s free to read) by assigning a cost to creating content and sharing the revenue with both consumers and creators using the bitcoin lightning network for microtransactions.
Let me know if you're interested and would like to hear more. Anything related to bitcoin tends to get heavily downvoted here, so I don't want to spend too much time explaining it.
I don't know about that. More like a Democrat Twitter clone. Liberals prefer echo chambers. And I don't mean that as a slur. They don't want to see or engage with content they disagree with. Bluesky fills that need for millions.
We’ve incrementally changed the definition of a social network, and hardly anyone notices, or cares.
X is now a place where you can post the most anodyne comment like “Happy Saturday folks” and immediately get 50 trolls arguing that it’s NOT a happy Saturday, and BTW you’re an ugly BIT*H. Every one of Elons’ 50 daily posts will be boosted and you have to see them. Your feed is now filled with right-wing content 24/7 from anyone who paid for a checkmark. From the moment you log into the system, you may be in fight-or-flight mode, and every single interaction is a potential argument. That’s our collective definition of a social network now, and if you want to opt out of that, you’re in a “liberal echo chamber”.
No, Bluesky lets folks actually use a network as before - finding interesting content, connecting with others, and yes, having civil disagreements. The change is that trolls whose only purpose in life is to find as many people as possible to argue with and shout at, can now be blocked from a user’s feed. It’s not a new innovation - it’s the way it used to work.
Conservatives love their echo chambers too. This is more of a modern cultural phenomenon than a political divide. The conservatives in my circle react strongly to any idea they don’t agree with and don’t want to see it, while the liberals tend to spread ideas they hate for rage baiting.
The way our social networks optimize for engagement is the root cause, since boring balanced content doesn’t create advertising revenue.
People have been upset about the direction of Twitter, for a variety of reasons, since Elon bought it. BlueSky was simply the best alternative available when people began leaving Twitter in droves. I don't think you can assign intent to the creation of the platform, which predates all of this.
I also think it's naive to accuse any particular group of people to be more or less prone to seeking echo chambers. That's endemic to humans in general, though certainly not completely pervasive.
I don't assign intent to the creation of the platform. I'm observing a change that happened to it at a point in time around when Jack left it, in the context of what else was happening
This isn't a liberal thing. There are tons of conservative echo chambers. Twitter has just now pushed away the liberal echo chamber side of things, so liberals are leaving. Everyone makes their own Twitter communities depending on what pages they follow.
My impression of the two demographics this targets (ie people that use TikTok and people that want to use decentralised social media) is that the set intersection of the two won’t be anywhere near the critical mass necessary to get a TikTok like algorithm working
At least (I assume?) a nice feature of short-form video app algorithms is that every few seconds, the users swipe or like or whatever to reveal preferences. The rate at which that data comes in from users is much higher than for long-form platforms.
I'd be more worried about actually getting content on there? But if Tiktok users are fragmenting onto Instagram Reels / Youtube Shorts etc, maybe the dominant strategy becomes to upload everywhere. In which case, maybe this platform has some semblance of a chance?
Also I didn't get to use it, but I suspect decentralized is going to be pretty tricky for a short-form video app because even minor loading times cause serious friction. If every other video load comes from a different service, it'll probably feel very slow in practice?
That could be offset by prefetching 5-10 of the current tag/interest and pushing the completes to the top of the que followed by the most complete downloads.. Or something. The initial load could be last cache just to have something present. Lots of options tbh.
I had the impression that TikTok must be pre-loading videos. I would keep 1-n ready to go for startup (depending on storage) and then load whatever is optimal at runtime. Optimise for no wait times, control the selection and distribution. It’s not like YouTube where the client is roaming all over. Video preferences seem local ish so you can keep videos in-country for a lot of content.
Also, people use tiktok because they like (or used to like) the Algorithm. A decentralized effort will live or die by its ability to steer people to content that they want to see.
I don't see the competition. That's like Men and women football. Most people just don't care about the latter and women football is not competing with men football -- at all.
Well said. Nothing will be able to really compete with TikTok or Instagram without reaching critical mass but the internet is big, with 0.1% of TikTok audience it is possible to have a feedback loop good enough to create something better than TikTok even if it takes 10 years. But we would need some 100 more pixelfeds to have one of them succeed.
Loops uses ActivityPub and the Fediverse as it's decentralization model (it's created by dansup, the dev of Pixelfed). The implementaion details, i.e. what's federated and how, are probably still fleshed out. It's the first project trying to bring the TikTok-style video feed to the Fediverse, so there's not much prior art.
Technological craftsmanship aside, I’m wondering, what’s the use case for these platforms?
I don’t debate the value of long form written content (blogs) and video content (YouTube), but even these are mainly polluted with SEO garbage articles, or the same idea in 100 different videos, because the content creation machine needs to keep going.
But what’s the real value of short form content like twitter/instagram/tiktok? You can’t convey a meaningful message in a limited amount words/seconds; you can’t use them as a diary or for sharing moments with people you love (I was toying with the idea of staying in instagram just to share pictures with my family, but there is no way I’m going to explain them how decentralized alternatives work); and they don’t have any decent monetization strategy other than ads, which means “influencers”, which means the same thing over again.
So why do we keep recreating the same tools but with a twist of “decentralized” (which has no appeal to the average person, aside from some online “anarchist”/people who like technology [myself included])? What’s the value other than “for fun”/“decentralization”?
>You can’t convey a meaningful message in a limited amount words/seconds
You most definitely can convey meaningful messages in a limited amount of time, and that's exactly the point, enforcing conciseness you end up with higher information density.
Decentralization provides the additional value of resistance to censorship and algorithmic biases.
I disagree with your first statement. The amount of times I saw an opinion/statement/fact posted on Twitter, which required me to write a response longer than 120 characters, can't be counted on both hands. At these moments, I just give up because it's impossible to have a discussion in a chain of 5 Twitter replies to yourself.
Now, because these opinions/statements are not debated due to the fact that not everyone is willing to pay Elon for a set of blue pixels and the ability to post longer form content, they stay there, fueling the echo chambers of opinions that the authors' audience holds, never to be questioned again.
I exaggerate a bit, but I hardly believe I'm the only one who thinks "fuck this, I don't have time to spread my message to multiple tweets/restructure it to fit the character limitation/etc".
I agree with the parent about conciseness being a welcome feature in the character limit. However, I recognize many people don't like it and have observed people cheating it with chain replies. Making everyone sum up all of their thoughts up into a few sentences however fun for some (me) can be overly restrictive or impossible for others.
Probably also depends how comfortable you are sharing deep or personal thoughts with others. Also how much you are interested in reading about a particular person's thoughts. In my case I don't know enough people that care about the things I'm enthusiastic about so I've built up a habit of being direct and to the point.
Being able to express yourself with limited words, is a skill everyone should aspire to master.
Having said that, the idea of social networks like twitter, is to spark a discussion, otherwise you would write a blog. Discussing ideas in twitter is very painful with its limited number of characters.
Unless, of course, all you want is a 2-3 sentence “revelations”, in a form of motivational posters we used to see around 2010, which you accept without questions. But then, is twitter really that different than 9gag for example?
Which is to say -- the "use case" is "people REALLY obviously like it."
Similarly, it's absurdly conclusory to say things like "You can't convey a meaningful message" just because, perhaps, YOU'RE not the one receiving it.
Anyway, even as a bit of an old-timer (48), as a Black man I've definitely seen some very good use cases; there are (were?) a decent number of kids out there making VERY INTELLIGENT Black political and historical commentary in this bite-size form.
I find argument like “people love it” a bit weird. People obviously, based on various historic references, REALLY liked gladiator games in Ancient Rome. Would you propose we bring those back to the masses?
I meant, shouldn’t we decide what’s good for our society based on some moral values and principles, and not based on things that the majority like?
As for the second part. Could you share some of those bite-sized historical comment and the discussions they sparked? I’m really curious to see and learn more, and perhaps even change my initial opinion.
On your first argument; we don't have to because we have e.g. football, and I would ABSOLUTELY argue that -- even if you don't like it -- it serves a DEEPLY important purpose in society (namely, a NECESSARY outlet for the weird tribal fighty instinct a lot of people, mostly men, have.)
Funny, I can't find the guy I really like, but -- stuff like this:
>But what’s the real value of short form content like twitter/instagram/tiktok
For users: dopamine hits.
For producers: attention, money received from marketing bureaus, free stuff sent to them to advertise, eventually hopefully enough popularity to kickstart whatever career path they may discover later. Many YouTubers used their YouTube viewership to launch books, for instance, and plenty of Tiktok famous people launched their own brands/scams.
- people hate being bored more than ever and don’t want to “invest” even 10 minutes into entertainment, short form videos can be a great way to kill time
- it provides a creative outlet for people who don’t want to invest money and time into creating something longer (filming, writing, research…)
Now, I believe that in reality most of the consumer side is afflicted by addiction and reduced attention span, and most creative side is fueled by egoism and grift. But like everything, the reality is mix of both.
I'd assume that most people wouldn't mind a little alcohol in order to easily navigate social interactions. Now, it doesn't mean I should run a business of offering alcohol stands to social gathering events (at least according to my moral views).
Boredom used to be a real thing that humans needed in order to function properly, and be creative. I remember that as a child I used to stare at the wall, used to go outside. Nowadays, I can't leave my phone in another room. I can't watch an old movie because my brain is not able to process the slow pace of events. I blame, in part, social networks and short from content.
Social networks should be about socialising and not a minority of professional content creators enriched by doomscroll-fueled advertisements.
Once people get feedback and good experiences things are evened out much better. Look at Tumblr or even Reddit, that despite being popular, never had influencer culture.
> Social networks should be about socialising and not a minority of professional content creators enriched by doomscroll-fueled advertisements.
> Once people get feedback and good experiences things are evened out much better. Look at Tumblr or even Reddit, that despite being popular, never had influencer culture.
Couldn’t agree more. But Pandora’s box has been opened and people being people and companies being profit maximizing machines … I doubt we will ever get there.
What’s really nice is small niche communities that exist in places like mastodon where often the “normals” don’t know about or don’t patronize making the experience really nice.
> Look at Tumblr or even Reddit, that despite being popular, never had influencer culture.
I can't talk about Tumblr, but while Reddit doesn't have an open influencer culture in the same way that TikTok or Instagram do, it does have massive amounts of content marketing. It is very much not the anti-advertising community heaven it appears to be, at least outside of very small subreddits. Taking it as an example of pure socializing is quite optimistic.
I use an extension to heavily filter fb on the computer.
When I get the "intended" experience opening on the phone it's so awful. It's mostly ads and pages I don't care about, and occasionally some local bands or venue writing what's happening, which is why I use facebook.
> Social networks should be about socialising and not a minority of professional content creators enriched by doomscroll-fueled advertisements.
That's absolutely not what Tiktok is. Most people who make money are a majority or random amateur users with massive social interactions, and i see no "doomscroll-fueled advertisements" whatsoever. Ads are very badly targeted, like on every other platform.
But being able to launch your own instance where you get 100% of all the money spent by the users either through ads or directly is a pretty good incentive, and beats what any other platform offers, no?
The trick is to get high enough numbers of users to use the platform though.
Agreed. What is needed is a way for instance owners to monetize.
So for example I own an instance and I will provide free video hosting. In exchange I will serve you ads and collect some data to target those. If you don't like that you could go to an instance that charges a monthly fee. Or you can run your own.
If I can monetize my instance I can also pay people on my server to provide content.
Sadly as far as I'm aware the fediverse developers have been mostly against adding monetization means to their projects, with a couple of small exceptions related to cryptocurrencies. I think Dan (Loops main dev) would do well to implement or accept contributions that implement simpler monetization for his project, but I somehow doubt it.
Imagine if the distributed nature applied to the advertising. So influencers weren't paid by the platform, but by individual sponsors. If you want to view my content, first watch this 10 sec ad from one of my sponsors. And I only have two sponsors, so you're never subjected to Nike ads or Russian dating ads or a million others. Just the silly Creality ad. If you want to see Tomas's content you have to see an ad from some cruise line or a skydiving company based in Connecticut. His ads are controlled by him. Mine are controlled by me.
Each producer has to hustle up their own ads. So they tend to coalesce onto huge servers that provide an ad service to do that work. Still, you often get some content sponsored by the local Mexican restaurant in some town you've never heard of.
The value in the video editor and music licensing can't be overstated. It would be awesome to have a nice cross platform opensource video editor for mobile. There are some commercial services selling SDKs that provide similar video editing capabilities.
I agree. I'm a big fan of the Fediverse and I think it's really cool to have something like TikTok, but without a good algorithm (that needs a lot of data), I don't see Loops to be a viable alternative for 99% of TikTok users.
I was also looking for some discussion on the algorithm...
One of Tiktok's competitive advantages was how it's algorithm was more like a lottery than ever before. You can go from being viral to irrelevant (and vice-versa) very quickly.
Yes, it’s much easier to use. You don’t have to look around for anything to use tiktok, it’s where you would expect it to be and everything makes sense. The UX reminds me of using iOS 1.
The content is more authentic too. A lot of what I see is from accounts that aren’t monetized, maybe 5% of the videos have less than 100 views.
I do use YouTube for music, but the rest of the content is so contrived and annoying. Instagram is too confusing to use, but all of the content feels like watching a commercial or QVC anyway, so I never bothered figuring it out.
How are decentralised platforms managing abusive content? TikTok had some bumps in the road maybe five years back with this, but got it under control. I know I don't want to be scrolling through video content and see illegal or unethical content.
That compliance aspect seems like one thing that pushes us towards centralised architectures for social media, but I'm guessing that AI models to screen images / videos are pretty widely available now and cheaply deployable?
In these systems you pick what you see and don't rely on a third party algorithm for that. If one instance allows the publications of things others disagree with defederation is an option.
Under no circumstances should we let AI filter the fediverse. Freedom is worth more than mild offense.
Fediverse-based platforms usually just don't do any proactive moderation. They rely on users spotting violations and reporting them. The reports are federated though. If admins of two servers disagree on what should be allowed, that usually leads to a federation block between them.
There is some proactive moderation on new servers in my experience. Servers belonging to certain controversial/unpleasant content groups are often blocked beforehand, for instance. Certain porn-oriented parts of the Fediverse basically exist as their own islands because nobody wants the moderation burden.
I think these federated platforms can use some kind of spam detection, though. A bunch of Japanese teenagers completely swamped most of the Fediverse with a shitty prank on another Discord server for instance, and there was that time someone automated posting CSAM across a few servers. It all kind of feels rather 1980s internet in a way, clearly not set up to deal with intentionally malicious people.
> I think these federated platforms can use some kind of spam detection, though.
I plan to explore this in Smithereen (my fediverse server project) at some point in the future. Ideally, I want something similar to VKontakte's "nospam", where moderators would create some sort of templates that all content goes through, and if there's a match, a violating post would get deleted, or its author's account suspended, or just a report created for further manual review, or whatever else the moderators deem necessary.
> A bunch of Japanese teenagers completely swamped most of the Fediverse with a shitty prank on another Discord server for instance
Yeah, I remember that. That was what got me thinking about spam filters. The posts were all the same, a simple substring match would do.
Will this take TikTok's (or even Reel's) marketshare? No. Will it get enough users to take off in the first place? Also probably not (see
bobnamob's comment). This is still really awesome. It's an awesome app and an even cooler project.
I understand the want for these new social networks to be less-controlled and more distributed, but I think there is a line in general for dopamine dependence and algorithmic targeting.
TikTok, Reels, YT Shorts, all are a net-drain when it comes to doom-scrolling/wasting time. I [[kind of]] understand keeping more traditional methods and making more open versions: Pixelfed (Insta), Bluesky (Twitter), etc. as people want some form of connection, but I don't think these short vid platforms should be put on a pedestal.
If your product is related to media (news, magazines, etc.), that's really good for you. because you got the people's attention. This is an assertive headline. but if you claim your product is better or equivalent to them. if your product does not meet your claims. This is not good for your product. They just try once and send it to trash urgently. Also, you lose potential users. The main issue here is user trust, not how your competitor is big.
Fundamentally, all social medias have two purposes:
1) Connecting with family and friends... for me, messaging Apps already solve that.
2) Curating new, exciting and relevant content.
What I always find interesting is that most projects try to solve 2) by building a platform that is exactly like the competitor but "decentralized".
If such a system instead runs entirely on the users device the curation could even use data such as browser bookmarks or history without infringing massively on privacy.
I think the platforms that do #1 well are not the same as the platforms that do #2 well. We call Instagram and tiktok "social media", but it's just media.
Went to the https://loops.video/ and installed the iOS TestFlight version of the app.
Tried to create an account. They said they sent me a confirmation link I have to click, but I haven’t received any link and it’s been an hour. It’s not in spam either.
I am very much in support of offering alternative options to centralized black-box apps with dubious profitability mechanisms. An option that doesn't catch on to the tune of a billion+ users is better than an option that never existed. The success of technology scaling to a global amount of users should be weighted also with possible-to-measurable harm.
Is there activity in the space of developing open-source social media algorithms? It has been interesting to see Threads and bluesky build integrations with Activity Pub (though there is risk for the embrace-extend-extinguish playbook to be applied against it). Are there similar possibilities for generating algorithmic standards for social media feeds that can be understood as deeply as one wishes to?
It's easy to get blocked on ActivityPub based networks like Mastodon or Pixelfed: if the instance admin doesn't like something you say, they can kick you out. Also if you run your own instance, it's quite possible that admins of other instances will block your instance, so their users (unknowingly) won't see your posts.
Another thing that literally happened to me was that the mastodon instance that I was on shut down and I found out after it happened and so I was not able to export any of my stuff.
Nostr and Bluesky are both decentralized protocols, but they differ in their design, goals, and implementation.
### *Nostr:*
- *Purpose*: Nostr is a decentralized protocol designed primarily for global, censorship-resistant communication. It is highly minimalistic and flexible, aiming to create an open platform for social interactions. It is a protocol rather than a platform or app itself, meaning different apps can use it.
- *How it works*: The core of Nostr is based on public-key cryptography. Users create a public/private key pair, and the public key serves as their identity. The protocol doesn’t rely on centralized servers; instead, users can publish messages to any server (or relay) that accepts them. The idea is that these relays spread messages, and they can be accessed from multiple places.
- *Strengths*:
- *Simple & lightweight*: It's designed to be minimalistic and easily implemented.
- *Censorship resistance*: No central authority can block content or users, which helps promote freedom of expression.
- *Flexibility*: Different applications and services can be built on top of the Nostr protocol, allowing for diverse user experiences.
- *Weaknesses*:
- *Scaling issues*: Since it's early-stage, the relays can sometimes struggle to handle heavy traffic.
- *User experience*: Apps using Nostr are still developing, so the UX/UI can be inconsistent.
### *Bluesky:*
- *Purpose*: Bluesky was created as a decentralized social network project started by Twitter, designed to create a more open and user-controlled internet. It aims to solve issues like centralized control, censorship, and data privacy while still providing a richer experience for users.
- *How it works*: Bluesky uses a protocol called *AT Protocol*, which is a more structured approach compared to Nostr. It involves user-controlled data (think decentralized identity, customizable feeds, etc.) and is designed to work across different services. The protocol enables interoperability, so users can interact with different platforms built on top of it.
- *Strengths*:
- *Robust framework*: The AT Protocol is designed with user control, scalability, and interoperability in mind.
- *Established foundation*: Since it’s backed by Twitter's original founders, Bluesky has strong development resources and early user interest.
- *Focus on UX*: Bluesky aims for a polished user experience that might attract users who are more familiar with traditional centralized platforms.
- *Weaknesses*:
- *Not fully decentralized yet*: While the protocol is decentralized, Bluesky itself is still under development and is not fully distributed in the way Nostr is.
- *Centralized governance*: The development of Bluesky is controlled by the Bluesky team, though they aim for a decentralized model over time.
### *Key Differences*:
1. *Complexity & Flexibility*: Nostr is more minimal and flexible, leaving a lot of the development to third-party apps. Bluesky's AT Protocol is more structured with a clear focus on user control and interoperability.
2. *Decentralization*: Nostr is more decentralized by design, with no central authority. Bluesky aims for decentralization but is still more centralized, especially during its early stages.
3. *Use Cases*: Nostr is a pure communication protocol, meaning apps built on it can range from simple messaging to fully-featured social platforms. Bluesky is more focused on social networking with an emphasis on user autonomy and privacy.
If you're looking for raw, censorship-resistant communication with flexibility, Nostr might be more appealing. But if you're after a polished, scalable social network with decentralized features and future growth, Bluesky could be the better fit.
TikTok competitor must have a functional live tool for users with over x amount of followers. Lives are very popular. Gifting cuts also help company revenues.
pixelfed looks like it's even worse at being user-friendly and approachable at all than mastodon, and it currently has all the same old problems mastodon did. user journey, onboarding, ease of use, are like they didn't even learn from mistakes of others. going to pixelfed website and then trying to get to a profile of someone tells me a lot about the state of that experience, when it can't even get the basics of basics right. (like, how to get to a profile on a such network. bizarrely, they don't show full handles with instance name in them, even though it simply doesn't work in a way that'd let you get to some profile through just the username alone from every server. you cannot even access profiles in a consistent and straightforward way.) honestly, hopefully it doesn't take off, cause it seems just mostly user hostile. even though it's free in some ways, it's just not better at being usable.
> like, how to get to a profile on a such network. bizarrely, they don't show full handles
You click on the author's name? I'm confused what the problem is. Also if you're looking at the discovery feed for an instance, you'll see only local posts, so there's no point in adding the domain on that view.
the problem (with just their web version i guess) is not showing the full username with instance where that user is at, nor recognizing when a username with an instance address appended is typed in. so when someone shares just their username (which is all they see on their profile, kinda deceptively cause you do need the instance address to get to someone), you're left guessing which instance they could be in. (the web version is also gated to hell behind sign up/login walls. well, whatever. i'm not going to find out if it's magically better if you cave, if it's this rickety without logging in)
it's insane to me that for a federated network they couldn't get @handle display and profile sharing right.
Is that something that actually happens often? You're saying that you're not a user currently, but I can tell you that I've never seen that in practice. Everyone either appends the domain or shares the profile link like https://pixelfed.social/arkadiusz
I mean, it's exactly as with email. We don't get the "you told me it's foobar, but I don't know which domain" issue there, even though most mail clients don't go out of their way to display your full email address.
i'm literally seeing people have those problems, which is why i'm writing about them lol. seeing people share their username and struggle to figure out which server they're at, either while trying to find someone, or even figuring that about themselves. all because pixelfed tries to be cute and doesn't show the full exact @ one would need to get to someone, but trims it just to the local username.
it doesn't inform their users that just username isn't enough, and that they need a full link (with web apps and the whole situation being 'get to anyone from anywhere' it is not intuitive that they need a whole link and not just the @ part in it), and doesn't show a full handle either (which is kinda spotty with where you can put it anyway, because you can't just enter a full handle in url of any instance and get there)
i guess this is just a fediverse convention for showing usernames, but it just ends up creating 'i can't find someone' problems. mastodon, for one, shows server name next to someone's username (and a tooltip with their full handle), but pixelfed doesn't. which is a bizarre choice for a federated service, cause it's counterproductive to federated connections.
Kinda funny to read all these comments looking at a single-person's effort and going "he, he, he cannot win against the adtech billions and their addiction machines".
What Pixelfed (and Loops and various other still half baked initiatives) prove is that there is an entire space of very interesting applications that are possible with the technologies of here and now. Bluesky was better resourced but essentially still in the same dwarf category versus big adtech.
Some people will take these proof-of-principle efforts to heart and build a beautiful future while others will cling on milking the totally broken paradigms of yesteryear.
I don't see anyone actually saying the "he, he," part. It's more "oof,". Nobody's happy with the situation, but it is what it is.
> Some people will [...] build a beautiful future
Hope so.
I'm sure TikTok and Facebook won't live forever. But I think they will not be overtaken by "tiktok, only distributed". Horses were not made obsolete by mechanical horses and all that. But that's just nitpicking.
The "distributed" part is still to pinned down anyway (which architecture scales and which not, under what definition of "scaling"). The discussions between activitypub and atproto protocol folks are informative in this respect.
But there is another non-trivial difference: these are open source projects.
The real Achilles heel is having a viable business model. But all business models, whether good or bad are inventions. Unless we think predatory adtech is the end of human ingenuity people will come up with ways.
> The real Achilles heel is having a viable business model.
Other activitypub projects are going well with a small minority of people donating the server costs, and project leaders just keeping those servers there because they want it.
I’m working on it.. to me distributed or decentralized or anything tech-y doesn’t matter. What matters is the masses, the common man and at the end of the day, the masses don’t care or know about that stuff. They want to be entertained and maybe they even want to help. Create simple but powerful user experiences. Make them addictive and productive and then you have something that can actually help society
Professional content creators need to get paid reasonably. AFAIR Tik Tok spent a lot of money getting good content creators in the beginning. YouTube and X pay peanuts but due to scale it's a significant amount of peanuts for top earners.
The platform is important but the content creators and the viewers are 10x more important.
Tiktok paid peanuts but had a large enough audience to get lots of attention. The money on Tiktok comes from brands being marketed (often via product placement), not necessarily from Tiktok itself. Tiktok does pay people, but not nearly as much as you'd think with how many influences are out there.
I don't think the existing product placement industry will suffer on alternatives, but Tiktok has what its competition lacks: an excellent algorithm, not bogged down by any ethics, optimised for pulling in as many people as possible. Filtering out ugly or disabled people and algorithmically censoring speech all across the spectrum would never pass on any open system, but it has worked wonders on Tiktok.
That's why I don't think open source alternatives will ever be popular, even if they find themselves backed by investors and paying out creators: they're still too ethical to be profitable.
Some extension of the Patreon model onto decentralised social media could work. I pay a few bucks a month to the creators of webcomics and other content that I enjoy, just because it's the right thing to do, and I dunno, it makes me feel more connected to these people that I've never met but who bring me some joy?
The amount of people like you is nowhere near enough to develop and maintain a robust economy.
I disagree. YouTube is absolutely filled to the brim with Patreon supported content. Even large channels need significant alternative income streams like merch to exist in the way they do, and they're still profitable. A sliver of the viewership cares enough to pay, but when you reach hundreds of thousands of people, you don't need all of them to pay for you to be profitable.
We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore.
> YouTube is absolutely filled to the brim with Patreon supported content.
Tell me how many of these content creators are exclusively supported by Patreon.
Also, ask any of these content creators (that supposedly are able to be sustained by Patreon) if they would be willing to move away from YouTube and into another platform like Peertube.
None of them will. Some of them won't mind creating the Peertube channel and distributing their content as well, but no one will leave YouTube, because they all know that YouTube is still the platform that enables all the economy to exist.
I'm not saying this because I don't like the Patreon model. Quite the opposite. [0]. But it's hard to argue with numbers, and the numbers are just not in favor of this idea that a whole industry can be supported by a minority of enthusiasts.
[0] : https://blog.communick.com/communick-collective-a-zero-commi...
Regarding your first question, it’s a bit of a trick question because no one is purposefully demonetizing their videos even though the ad revenue is relatively low, but Adrian Black from Adrian’s Digital Basement came to mind as someone that is supported almost exclusively by Patreon. He never does sponsors on his channel, only makes money from Patreon and a bit from ad revenue from YouTube, and specifically thanks to his Patreon income was able to quit his tech job and go full time in YouTube.
LGR is another one that comes to mind that I think barely ever does sponsors and makes most of his income from Patreon. I’m sure there are many others as well.
Can we get them out of YouTube and onto their own PeerTube server?
Not a rhetorical question. If there is anyone that is not dependent of YouTube's revenue and already amassed enough supporters, is there anything holding them to Google?
I feel like the main thing would be discoverability. If they’re not showing up in people’s recommended they’ll have significantly lower viewership which could ultimately affect their Patreon income over time.
They’re both techie enough to set one up, so I feel like the best approach if they were interested would be to set it up as a mirror and see how it goes with traffic. That way they’re at least not beholden 100% to YouTube for their livelihood.
Another thing that just came to mind, how is discoverability of PeerTube in search results compared to YouTube? I wouldn’t be surprised if Google promotes YouTube links over PeerTube in search results which could also have a big impact.
> I feel like the main thing would be discoverability.
"Hey everyone, big update! I'm leaving YouTube and moving my channel to PeerTube. You can follow me at @myusername@myserver. My last video on this channel will be a quick tutorial showing how PeerTube works and why it's better than YouTube. See you there soon!"
> If they’re not showing up in people’s recommended they’ll have significantly lower viewership which could ultimately affect their Patreon income over time.
Why? If they already have a substantial amount of patrons, surely they are not worried about pleasing the algorithm. They can live off solely off their fans who support them directly. Right? Right??
> I feel like the best approach if they were interested would be to set it up as a mirror and see how it goes with traffic.
Ahem, which part of "Some of them won't mind creating the Peertube channel and distributing their content as well, but no one will leave YouTube, because they all know that YouTube is still the platform that enables all the economy to exist." did you miss in my original comment?
Sorry about the caustic response. I'm just tired of wishful thinking passing for grounded reasoning. When/if you find me one creator brave enough to put moral principles over their own livelihood by leaving YouTube, then I'll accept that Patreon alone is a viable alternative. Until then, it's just signaling and posturing.
Without knowing what percentage of revenue is from Youtube and what percentage is from Patreon, this isn't really important. You can get 10% of income from Patreon and still be considered "Patreon supported."
> We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore.
Piracy and entitlement.
So what? Not every product needs to be at the 100m user scale to be a success.
The nice thing about this era for a creator is that having 10,000 dedicated fans is enough.
Dedicated fans will happily monetize on you. 100,000 low engagement fans won't make nearly as much.
> Not every product needs to be at the 100m user scale to be a success.
But the absolute overwhelming majority of content creators are putting all the work with the hopes of achieving that scale of success.
> The nice thing about this era for a creator is that having 10,000 dedicated fans is enough.
For one creator, yes. For a whole economy that can bring billions of dollars per year, you will need to have a much larger consumer base, and you'll need to have a substantial part of them willing to support a lot more than a handful of creators.
Maybe professional content creators don't need to exist at all. I look at people like PewDiePie and MrBeast and I wonder if society really needs anything that makes those men possible.
You are looking at the extreme end of the bell curve and think they represent the totality of the group.
For every Mr. Beast, there are tens of thousands of other people with 10k-1M subscribers who produce valuable content which would never exist if it were not for the already existing audience.
I chose those names because they are a pure distillation of "everything that is wrong..." But it's pretty easy to find lots of issues that wouldn't exist if "digital media content creator" wasn't a job that kids today are aspiring to.
Look at video thumbnails and "YouTube face". Look at how many videos are feature-film length ordeals: there is no way everyone is actively watching all that content; they're all putting it in their TVs in the background. Look at how every video on YouTube is at least 10 minutes long: that happens because it means the video will get a second ad spot. If it comes down to making a 9.5 minute video it a 10.1 minute one, well, nobody is going to pass up stretching an extra 36 seconds out of the B-roll.
If you're an advertiser, it's gotta be driving you mad. All this micro-optimizing for length to get ad spots has to be really destroying their click through rates. Which is fine with me, actually, cry me big crocodile years. But it's probably also why they've spent so much effort on in-video sponsorships. Now that really pisses me off, because I'm paying YouTube for an ad-free experience and yet YouTube turns a blind eye to its content creators circumventing my preference.
But all of this would go away if YouTube didn't pay content creators. "Why shouldn't people get paid for their work?" They should. But posting to YouTube shouldn't be someone's job. Because the remuneration system is perverse.
> But posting to YouTube shouldn't be someone's job.
Why not? Should they instead be kissing someone else's ass to get an unpaid internship at some lawyer firm? Aiming to get a stable job at one of the Big 4 accounting firms? Helping big fat cats get even fatter by working on VC? Toiling at some farm? Taking care of our kids at salaries that barely affords them to live close to where they teach?
No one is being forced to do YouTube videos, and if that's what they are preferring to do, maybe it is better than the alternatives?
> Why not?
I said why not. Because the remuneration system is perverse.
The vast majority of people on YouTube are not going to make any money for what they post. I don't just mean "pocket change they wouldn't have had otherwise". I mean literally 0 dollars versus YouTube easily taking in millions over the long tail.
As an example, I'm one of these such creators. I have a few videos that have been up for a long time and in that time have gathered low 100k+ views.
If those views had all occurred in one month, YouTube would pay me somewhere around $2000. But because this happened over 10 years, YouTube has always said, "eh, you know what, it's not enough to bother."
I'm sorry, but in any other case, if someone wasn't paying me $200 a year that they owed me, I'd be pissed. But I digress, that's not the issue, and that's not why I post videos to YouTube.
The issue is that this is the case for the majority of content creators on YouTube. YouTube makes a massive amount of money by exploiting people's content that they will never pay 1 red cent for. For a lot of those people, they continue on because of a misguided dream that they might one day get to be they anointed few who gets to have their "fair" share of their content.
Through the revenue sharing model, YouTube has created a perverse incentive structure that pushes content creators to do things in ways they wouldn't otherwise have done, on a promise that is likely never to occur. YouTube creator shouldn't be a job not because I think YouTube creators should find "something better to do", but because YouTube is a shit company that shouldn't be allowed to operate the way they do.
Sorry, you previous post started complaining with "digital media content creator" in general, then you moved on to complain about YouTube.
If your problem is with the implementation from one company and not the whole idea, fine. But this is not an issue with the "revenue share" model.
Also:
> For a lot of those people, they continue on because of a misguided dream that they might one day get to be they anointed few who gets to have their "fair" share of their content.
It's not different from basketball/baseball/football players that spend all their young years working for free and expecting to become pro. Or musicians who get into pay-to-play circuits in the hopes of ever becoming the next star, or fashion models who endure all the crazy routine of a talent agency based on the dream of being as rich as Gisele Büdchen, and even to the batches of YC founders that are given 500k and are told "no, no, this money is not for you. This money is for you to try to make a billion dollar business. Your first priority is to make me even richer, not your well-being."
Yes, it is no different, and it's a problem. Football players and noodles are especially good examples. These are people who literally destroy their bodies on a promise that is oversold. So maybe the entire system should be done away with. If we can't have professional sports players and professional models and YouTube content creators without exploitation, then maybe we shouldn't have them at all. I dodn't see it as much different from not legalizing hard drugs like heroin. If the drug is too addictive to allow for responsible use, then we shouldn't have it at all.
If you follow some of the creators that got big in YouTube and are also now big in Tik Tok, you'll see that it's actually worse in Tik Tok. Unlike YouTube that distributed a percentage of revenue, Tik Tok has a flat "creators' fund" that gets doled out proportionally. So where a boy account on YouTube draws more revenue to YouTube, that makes the pie bigger, so pre-existing accounts aren't losing out just because someone else is doing better (e.g. they serve different demos). On Tik Tok, each account is not just in competition for existing eyeballs, they're in competition with all other accounts regardless of overlap of audience.
As much criticism as they get, they are at least less opaque than the big corporate media guys who are making movies, TV, and news.
I think this is a large part of the problem with YouTube and the like. People seem to act like, because this isn't traditional media, then the creators must be more like us than them. Maybe that was true at the dawn of YouTube 15 - 20 years ago. But it's definitely not true now. The way these content creators work is a huge apparatus of media production indistinguishable from any other production studio in traditional media. Indeed, maybe if them even aspire to get into traditional media. Well, until they find out the raw deal the distribution companies want to give them, that is.
Leaving Tiktok and YouTube aside, viewing posters on Twitter as "content creators" would be dangerous. We don't want to judge tweets by the metric of whether they are the most engaging
Posters on X are "content creators" and get paid based on impressions.
Twitter never paid top tweeters. The X attempt at payouts seems to be yet another component of making the platform worse. Mind you, Vine collapsed over a dispute with its creators.
People happily post on Bluesky or HN for free. I think paid content is a different genre, and we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising.
> People happily post on Bluesky or HN for free. I think paid content is a different genre, and we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising.
I think this is so important and something that gets missed a lot, especially any place that is even tangentially related to "entrepreneurship" like HN. "Why wouldn't you try to monetize every single aspect of your life?"
I do wood working as a hobby. People keep asking me if I have plans to sell my stuff, then they look at me weird when I say no. Some of them even look like they've been personally insulted, which is weird considering I'm the one being pressed.
I do it because I can make nice things for my family and friends, unique things that have a lot of meaning to them. It's not possible to monetize what I do because what I do only works because it's not monetizable.
> we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising.
Sorry for the plug, but the two of us at https://stacker.news/ managed to get users to pay for content (even though it’s free to read) by assigning a cost to creating content and sharing the revenue with both consumers and creators using the bitcoin lightning network for microtransactions.
Let me know if you're interested and would like to hear more. Anything related to bitcoin tends to get heavily downvoted here, so I don't want to spend too much time explaining it.
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Can you elaborate on why this is "clearly" the case?
I can't train your intuition for you.
Who trained your intuition?
I am guessing conspiracy theory videos?
I... what?
I don't know about that. More like a Democrat Twitter clone. Liberals prefer echo chambers. And I don't mean that as a slur. They don't want to see or engage with content they disagree with. Bluesky fills that need for millions.
We’ve incrementally changed the definition of a social network, and hardly anyone notices, or cares.
X is now a place where you can post the most anodyne comment like “Happy Saturday folks” and immediately get 50 trolls arguing that it’s NOT a happy Saturday, and BTW you’re an ugly BIT*H. Every one of Elons’ 50 daily posts will be boosted and you have to see them. Your feed is now filled with right-wing content 24/7 from anyone who paid for a checkmark. From the moment you log into the system, you may be in fight-or-flight mode, and every single interaction is a potential argument. That’s our collective definition of a social network now, and if you want to opt out of that, you’re in a “liberal echo chamber”.
No, Bluesky lets folks actually use a network as before - finding interesting content, connecting with others, and yes, having civil disagreements. The change is that trolls whose only purpose in life is to find as many people as possible to argue with and shout at, can now be blocked from a user’s feed. It’s not a new innovation - it’s the way it used to work.
Did Twitter/X remove blocking or something?
Blocking on X has been severely watered down.
Bluesky has a nuclear block which is awesome.
Conservatives love their echo chambers too. This is more of a modern cultural phenomenon than a political divide. The conservatives in my circle react strongly to any idea they don’t agree with and don’t want to see it, while the liberals tend to spread ideas they hate for rage baiting.
The way our social networks optimize for engagement is the root cause, since boring balanced content doesn’t create advertising revenue.
Conservatives love echo chambers so much they're willing to eradicate trans people from public view entirely so they don't have to think about them.
People have been upset about the direction of Twitter, for a variety of reasons, since Elon bought it. BlueSky was simply the best alternative available when people began leaving Twitter in droves. I don't think you can assign intent to the creation of the platform, which predates all of this.
I also think it's naive to accuse any particular group of people to be more or less prone to seeking echo chambers. That's endemic to humans in general, though certainly not completely pervasive.
I don't assign intent to the creation of the platform. I'm observing a change that happened to it at a point in time around when Jack left it, in the context of what else was happening
This isn't a liberal thing. There are tons of conservative echo chambers. Twitter has just now pushed away the liberal echo chamber side of things, so liberals are leaving. Everyone makes their own Twitter communities depending on what pages they follow.
My impression of the two demographics this targets (ie people that use TikTok and people that want to use decentralised social media) is that the set intersection of the two won’t be anywhere near the critical mass necessary to get a TikTok like algorithm working
At least (I assume?) a nice feature of short-form video app algorithms is that every few seconds, the users swipe or like or whatever to reveal preferences. The rate at which that data comes in from users is much higher than for long-form platforms.
I'd be more worried about actually getting content on there? But if Tiktok users are fragmenting onto Instagram Reels / Youtube Shorts etc, maybe the dominant strategy becomes to upload everywhere. In which case, maybe this platform has some semblance of a chance?
Also I didn't get to use it, but I suspect decentralized is going to be pretty tricky for a short-form video app because even minor loading times cause serious friction. If every other video load comes from a different service, it'll probably feel very slow in practice?
That could be offset by prefetching 5-10 of the current tag/interest and pushing the completes to the top of the que followed by the most complete downloads.. Or something. The initial load could be last cache just to have something present. Lots of options tbh.
I had the impression that TikTok must be pre-loading videos. I would keep 1-n ready to go for startup (depending on storage) and then load whatever is optimal at runtime. Optimise for no wait times, control the selection and distribution. It’s not like YouTube where the client is roaming all over. Video preferences seem local ish so you can keep videos in-country for a lot of content.
I assume Tiktok loads the initial fMP4 fragment (metadata + 500ms of video) for about 10 videos at once.
If you scroll extremely fast through videos, you'll always get a short moment where it's loading after the same number of videos.
Also, people use tiktok because they like (or used to like) the Algorithm. A decentralized effort will live or die by its ability to steer people to content that they want to see.
They don't have to care about decentralisation....
Can the word "competitor" really be used to describe something that can't compete?
It's an alternative, one which the world would be way better off adopting, but far from being a competitor, unfortunately.
Even if you're last place you're still part of the competition
In theory but not really in practice. Just like my toy compiler is not really competing with gcc or llvm.
I wonder though if the "decentralised" thing is really a feature for the audience that tiktok serves.
Perhaps "ad-free" and "not about to be banned in the US" are more compelling features
okay but "ad-free" means costs elsewhere and "not about to be banned in the US" means they're "competing" with Reels and Shorts.
unless this project is for the sake of resume-padding or something else other than actual use, someone has wasted a lot of life hours developing this
"just a hobby, won't be all big and professional like gnu"
If a project serves someone well, then it's competitive for that person.
> "just a hobby, won't be all big and professional like gnu"
while many gnu projects and linux itself started just like that
Fair enough so perhaps it's better to say not yet competitive.
I don't see the competition. That's like Men and women football. Most people just don't care about the latter and women football is not competing with men football -- at all.
Well said. Nothing will be able to really compete with TikTok or Instagram without reaching critical mass but the internet is big, with 0.1% of TikTok audience it is possible to have a feedback loop good enough to create something better than TikTok even if it takes 10 years. But we would need some 100 more pixelfeds to have one of them succeed.
How can TikTok compete when it is not available from the app stores?
For me the website is down, but it is on the archive: (https://web.archive.org/web/20250125101223/https://wedistrib...)
It feels very hard to find any sort of information on "Loops". Especially regarding their decentralization model.
Loops uses ActivityPub and the Fediverse as it's decentralization model (it's created by dansup, the dev of Pixelfed). The implementaion details, i.e. what's federated and how, are probably still fleshed out. It's the first project trying to bring the TikTok-style video feed to the Fediverse, so there's not much prior art.
It's not the website. There is no name resolution resolving to the domain wedistribute.org.
There were two hosts recorded in the DNS history:
auth.wedistribute.org 216.249.100.234
social.wedistribute.org 24.199.69.82
which no longer exist (i.e. unreachable, due to DNS of their domain failing now)
Technological craftsmanship aside, I’m wondering, what’s the use case for these platforms?
I don’t debate the value of long form written content (blogs) and video content (YouTube), but even these are mainly polluted with SEO garbage articles, or the same idea in 100 different videos, because the content creation machine needs to keep going.
But what’s the real value of short form content like twitter/instagram/tiktok? You can’t convey a meaningful message in a limited amount words/seconds; you can’t use them as a diary or for sharing moments with people you love (I was toying with the idea of staying in instagram just to share pictures with my family, but there is no way I’m going to explain them how decentralized alternatives work); and they don’t have any decent monetization strategy other than ads, which means “influencers”, which means the same thing over again.
So why do we keep recreating the same tools but with a twist of “decentralized” (which has no appeal to the average person, aside from some online “anarchist”/people who like technology [myself included])? What’s the value other than “for fun”/“decentralization”?
>You can’t convey a meaningful message in a limited amount words/seconds
You most definitely can convey meaningful messages in a limited amount of time, and that's exactly the point, enforcing conciseness you end up with higher information density.
Decentralization provides the additional value of resistance to censorship and algorithmic biases.
I disagree with your first statement. The amount of times I saw an opinion/statement/fact posted on Twitter, which required me to write a response longer than 120 characters, can't be counted on both hands. At these moments, I just give up because it's impossible to have a discussion in a chain of 5 Twitter replies to yourself.
Now, because these opinions/statements are not debated due to the fact that not everyone is willing to pay Elon for a set of blue pixels and the ability to post longer form content, they stay there, fueling the echo chambers of opinions that the authors' audience holds, never to be questioned again.
I exaggerate a bit, but I hardly believe I'm the only one who thinks "fuck this, I don't have time to spread my message to multiple tweets/restructure it to fit the character limitation/etc".
I agree with the parent about conciseness being a welcome feature in the character limit. However, I recognize many people don't like it and have observed people cheating it with chain replies. Making everyone sum up all of their thoughts up into a few sentences however fun for some (me) can be overly restrictive or impossible for others.
Probably also depends how comfortable you are sharing deep or personal thoughts with others. Also how much you are interested in reading about a particular person's thoughts. In my case I don't know enough people that care about the things I'm enthusiastic about so I've built up a habit of being direct and to the point.
Being able to express yourself with limited words, is a skill everyone should aspire to master.
Having said that, the idea of social networks like twitter, is to spark a discussion, otherwise you would write a blog. Discussing ideas in twitter is very painful with its limited number of characters.
Unless, of course, all you want is a 2-3 sentence “revelations”, in a form of motivational posters we used to see around 2010, which you accept without questions. But then, is twitter really that different than 9gag for example?
I find this such a backwards question.
Which is to say -- the "use case" is "people REALLY obviously like it."
Similarly, it's absurdly conclusory to say things like "You can't convey a meaningful message" just because, perhaps, YOU'RE not the one receiving it.
Anyway, even as a bit of an old-timer (48), as a Black man I've definitely seen some very good use cases; there are (were?) a decent number of kids out there making VERY INTELLIGENT Black political and historical commentary in this bite-size form.
I find argument like “people love it” a bit weird. People obviously, based on various historic references, REALLY liked gladiator games in Ancient Rome. Would you propose we bring those back to the masses?
I meant, shouldn’t we decide what’s good for our society based on some moral values and principles, and not based on things that the majority like?
As for the second part. Could you share some of those bite-sized historical comment and the discussions they sparked? I’m really curious to see and learn more, and perhaps even change my initial opinion.
On your first argument; we don't have to because we have e.g. football, and I would ABSOLUTELY argue that -- even if you don't like it -- it serves a DEEPLY important purpose in society (namely, a NECESSARY outlet for the weird tribal fighty instinct a lot of people, mostly men, have.)
Funny, I can't find the guy I really like, but -- stuff like this:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/young-tiktok-users-making-activism...
>But what’s the real value of short form content like twitter/instagram/tiktok
For users: dopamine hits.
For producers: attention, money received from marketing bureaus, free stuff sent to them to advertise, eventually hopefully enough popularity to kickstart whatever career path they may discover later. Many YouTubers used their YouTube viewership to launch books, for instance, and plenty of Tiktok famous people launched their own brands/scams.
So for users, it's just another alternative of slot machine / time-wasting activity.
And for producers, yet another ticket to continue engaging in the capitalist system for the sake of capitalism itself.
Putting on my most charitable hat on:
- people hate being bored more than ever and don’t want to “invest” even 10 minutes into entertainment, short form videos can be a great way to kill time - it provides a creative outlet for people who don’t want to invest money and time into creating something longer (filming, writing, research…)
Now, I believe that in reality most of the consumer side is afflicted by addiction and reduced attention span, and most creative side is fueled by egoism and grift. But like everything, the reality is mix of both.
I'd assume that most people wouldn't mind a little alcohol in order to easily navigate social interactions. Now, it doesn't mean I should run a business of offering alcohol stands to social gathering events (at least according to my moral views).
Boredom used to be a real thing that humans needed in order to function properly, and be creative. I remember that as a child I used to stare at the wall, used to go outside. Nowadays, I can't leave my phone in another room. I can't watch an old movie because my brain is not able to process the slow pace of events. I blame, in part, social networks and short from content.
Good attempt but TikTok also makes people rich. Amassing a huge following and being popular brings brand deals etc.
I hope this takes off though.
Social networks should be about socialising and not a minority of professional content creators enriched by doomscroll-fueled advertisements.
Once people get feedback and good experiences things are evened out much better. Look at Tumblr or even Reddit, that despite being popular, never had influencer culture.
> Social networks should be about socialising and not a minority of professional content creators enriched by doomscroll-fueled advertisements.
> Once people get feedback and good experiences things are evened out much better. Look at Tumblr or even Reddit, that despite being popular, never had influencer culture.
Couldn’t agree more. But Pandora’s box has been opened and people being people and companies being profit maximizing machines … I doubt we will ever get there.
What’s really nice is small niche communities that exist in places like mastodon where often the “normals” don’t know about or don’t patronize making the experience really nice.
> Look at Tumblr or even Reddit, that despite being popular, never had influencer culture.
I can't talk about Tumblr, but while Reddit doesn't have an open influencer culture in the same way that TikTok or Instagram do, it does have massive amounts of content marketing. It is very much not the anti-advertising community heaven it appears to be, at least outside of very small subreddits. Taking it as an example of pure socializing is quite optimistic.
I use an extension to heavily filter fb on the computer.
When I get the "intended" experience opening on the phone it's so awful. It's mostly ads and pages I don't care about, and occasionally some local bands or venue writing what's happening, which is why I use facebook.
> Social networks
It doesn’t bill itself as a social network though. Neither does TikTok seem to.
> Social networks should be about socialising and not a minority of professional content creators enriched by doomscroll-fueled advertisements.
That's absolutely not what Tiktok is. Most people who make money are a majority or random amateur users with massive social interactions, and i see no "doomscroll-fueled advertisements" whatsoever. Ads are very badly targeted, like on every other platform.
But being able to launch your own instance where you get 100% of all the money spent by the users either through ads or directly is a pretty good incentive, and beats what any other platform offers, no?
The trick is to get high enough numbers of users to use the platform though.
Agreed. What is needed is a way for instance owners to monetize.
So for example I own an instance and I will provide free video hosting. In exchange I will serve you ads and collect some data to target those. If you don't like that you could go to an instance that charges a monthly fee. Or you can run your own.
If I can monetize my instance I can also pay people on my server to provide content.
There's nothing stopping you. Set up an instance, disable public registration, and send an invite to those that send you a payment.
To put my money where my mouth is, the Mastodon instance I'm using charges people $20/year and I'm happy to pay it.
Sadly as far as I'm aware the fediverse developers have been mostly against adding monetization means to their projects, with a couple of small exceptions related to cryptocurrencies. I think Dan (Loops main dev) would do well to implement or accept contributions that implement simpler monetization for his project, but I somehow doubt it.
Imagine if the distributed nature applied to the advertising. So influencers weren't paid by the platform, but by individual sponsors. If you want to view my content, first watch this 10 sec ad from one of my sponsors. And I only have two sponsors, so you're never subjected to Nike ads or Russian dating ads or a million others. Just the silly Creality ad. If you want to see Tomas's content you have to see an ad from some cruise line or a skydiving company based in Connecticut. His ads are controlled by him. Mine are controlled by me.
Each producer has to hustle up their own ads. So they tend to coalesce onto huge servers that provide an ad service to do that work. Still, you often get some content sponsored by the local Mexican restaurant in some town you've never heard of.
Does it make TikTok better that we're seeing paid endorsements?
Yes. It drives creators to the platform to make money, which means we get more cool content.
I'm not sure i agree that paid content is cool in general.
Site is down for me
https://web.archive.org/web/20250123192931/https://wedistrib...
If I understand correctly, the core value of TikTok lies in its algorithm, which is not mentioned in the article.
+ capcut (video editor)
+ Viable income for content creators
The value in the video editor and music licensing can't be overstated. It would be awesome to have a nice cross platform opensource video editor for mobile. There are some commercial services selling SDKs that provide similar video editing capabilities.
I agree. I'm a big fan of the Fediverse and I think it's really cool to have something like TikTok, but without a good algorithm (that needs a lot of data), I don't see Loops to be a viable alternative for 99% of TikTok users.
I was also looking for some discussion on the algorithm...
One of Tiktok's competitive advantages was how it's algorithm was more like a lottery than ever before. You can go from being viral to irrelevant (and vice-versa) very quickly.
also in its ease of use and appeal to young, non-techy people
Is it any easier to use than Reels or YouTube shorts?
Yes, it’s much easier to use. You don’t have to look around for anything to use tiktok, it’s where you would expect it to be and everything makes sense. The UX reminds me of using iOS 1.
The content is more authentic too. A lot of what I see is from accounts that aren’t monetized, maybe 5% of the videos have less than 100 views.
I do use YouTube for music, but the rest of the content is so contrived and annoying. Instagram is too confusing to use, but all of the content feels like watching a commercial or QVC anyway, so I never bothered figuring it out.
How are decentralised platforms managing abusive content? TikTok had some bumps in the road maybe five years back with this, but got it under control. I know I don't want to be scrolling through video content and see illegal or unethical content.
That compliance aspect seems like one thing that pushes us towards centralised architectures for social media, but I'm guessing that AI models to screen images / videos are pretty widely available now and cheaply deployable?
In these systems you pick what you see and don't rely on a third party algorithm for that. If one instance allows the publications of things others disagree with defederation is an option.
Under no circumstances should we let AI filter the fediverse. Freedom is worth more than mild offense.
Fediverse-based platforms usually just don't do any proactive moderation. They rely on users spotting violations and reporting them. The reports are federated though. If admins of two servers disagree on what should be allowed, that usually leads to a federation block between them.
There is some proactive moderation on new servers in my experience. Servers belonging to certain controversial/unpleasant content groups are often blocked beforehand, for instance. Certain porn-oriented parts of the Fediverse basically exist as their own islands because nobody wants the moderation burden.
I think these federated platforms can use some kind of spam detection, though. A bunch of Japanese teenagers completely swamped most of the Fediverse with a shitty prank on another Discord server for instance, and there was that time someone automated posting CSAM across a few servers. It all kind of feels rather 1980s internet in a way, clearly not set up to deal with intentionally malicious people.
> I think these federated platforms can use some kind of spam detection, though.
I plan to explore this in Smithereen (my fediverse server project) at some point in the future. Ideally, I want something similar to VKontakte's "nospam", where moderators would create some sort of templates that all content goes through, and if there's a match, a violating post would get deleted, or its author's account suspended, or just a report created for further manual review, or whatever else the moderators deem necessary.
> A bunch of Japanese teenagers completely swamped most of the Fediverse with a shitty prank on another Discord server for instance
Yeah, I remember that. That was what got me thinking about spam filters. The posts were all the same, a simple substring match would do.
Will this take TikTok's (or even Reel's) marketshare? No. Will it get enough users to take off in the first place? Also probably not (see bobnamob's comment). This is still really awesome. It's an awesome app and an even cooler project.
I understand the want for these new social networks to be less-controlled and more distributed, but I think there is a line in general for dopamine dependence and algorithmic targeting.
TikTok, Reels, YT Shorts, all are a net-drain when it comes to doom-scrolling/wasting time. I [[kind of]] understand keeping more traditional methods and making more open versions: Pixelfed (Insta), Bluesky (Twitter), etc. as people want some form of connection, but I don't think these short vid platforms should be put on a pedestal.
If your product is related to media (news, magazines, etc.), that's really good for you. because you got the people's attention. This is an assertive headline. but if you claim your product is better or equivalent to them. if your product does not meet your claims. This is not good for your product. They just try once and send it to trash urgently. Also, you lose potential users. The main issue here is user trust, not how your competitor is big.
Fundamentally, all social medias have two purposes:
1) Connecting with family and friends... for me, messaging Apps already solve that.
2) Curating new, exciting and relevant content.
What I always find interesting is that most projects try to solve 2) by building a platform that is exactly like the competitor but "decentralized".
If such a system instead runs entirely on the users device the curation could even use data such as browser bookmarks or history without infringing massively on privacy.
I think the platforms that do #1 well are not the same as the platforms that do #2 well. We call Instagram and tiktok "social media", but it's just media.
No faith on a piece of software of the author of the now abandoned Pixelfed, a software that is not finished and still very buggy.
Pixelfed released an updated app on TestFlight on January 13 (12 days ago). Not sure where you are getting abandoned from.
Buggy, sure. It’s new.
Abandoned? I don’t think that’s accurate at all.
Went to the https://loops.video/ and installed the iOS TestFlight version of the app.
Tried to create an account. They said they sent me a confirmation link I have to click, but I haven’t received any link and it’s been an hour. It’s not in spam either.
They getting absolutely hammered. We gave it a day; the email eventually came and managed to get in.
Yeah, the email confirming account had been activated came eventually for me too :)
I guess it’s a good sign in a way. Shows that people are interested.
Is this a suitable place to import my yet unfinished looping SWFs?
Could we in theory have an algorithm to promote things like interaction, inclusiveness, culture matching etc?
I get that money has to come from somewhere, but I wouldn't mind a social network that's not focusing on making you stay and scroll.
It would be super interesting and useful for the world to have open source algorithms, so you can choose what best suits you.
I think Bluesky's ATP can support that, not sure about ActivityPub, but it probably can too.
Don't these algorithms use significant compute and lots of data (not just from you, from other people, too)?
It seems like it'd be difficult to just run up an algorithm on a local server, though I'm not sure if that's where you're suggesting
[flagged]
i don’t think encouraging people to include and care about one another is pushing an echo chamber
I am very much in support of offering alternative options to centralized black-box apps with dubious profitability mechanisms. An option that doesn't catch on to the tune of a billion+ users is better than an option that never existed. The success of technology scaling to a global amount of users should be weighted also with possible-to-measurable harm.
Is there activity in the space of developing open-source social media algorithms? It has been interesting to see Threads and bluesky build integrations with Activity Pub (though there is risk for the embrace-extend-extinguish playbook to be applied against it). Are there similar possibilities for generating algorithmic standards for social media feeds that can be understood as deeply as one wishes to?
Website is down. Anyone has a mirror link?
For me acc system is kinda broken
Bröther can finally have all the Lööps they wanted?
they are censoring as much as classical social media networks. lol.
Sorry what?! It’s a decentralised social network. You and your friends could spin up an instance. What are you even talking about?!
It's easy to get blocked on ActivityPub based networks like Mastodon or Pixelfed: if the instance admin doesn't like something you say, they can kick you out. Also if you run your own instance, it's quite possible that admins of other instances will block your instance, so their users (unknowingly) won't see your posts.
Another thing that literally happened to me was that the mastodon instance that I was on shut down and I found out after it happened and so I was not able to export any of my stuff.
Nostr and Bluesky are both decentralized protocols, but they differ in their design, goals, and implementation.
### *Nostr:* - *Purpose*: Nostr is a decentralized protocol designed primarily for global, censorship-resistant communication. It is highly minimalistic and flexible, aiming to create an open platform for social interactions. It is a protocol rather than a platform or app itself, meaning different apps can use it. - *How it works*: The core of Nostr is based on public-key cryptography. Users create a public/private key pair, and the public key serves as their identity. The protocol doesn’t rely on centralized servers; instead, users can publish messages to any server (or relay) that accepts them. The idea is that these relays spread messages, and they can be accessed from multiple places. - *Strengths*: - *Simple & lightweight*: It's designed to be minimalistic and easily implemented. - *Censorship resistance*: No central authority can block content or users, which helps promote freedom of expression. - *Flexibility*: Different applications and services can be built on top of the Nostr protocol, allowing for diverse user experiences. - *Weaknesses*: - *Scaling issues*: Since it's early-stage, the relays can sometimes struggle to handle heavy traffic. - *User experience*: Apps using Nostr are still developing, so the UX/UI can be inconsistent.
### *Bluesky:* - *Purpose*: Bluesky was created as a decentralized social network project started by Twitter, designed to create a more open and user-controlled internet. It aims to solve issues like centralized control, censorship, and data privacy while still providing a richer experience for users. - *How it works*: Bluesky uses a protocol called *AT Protocol*, which is a more structured approach compared to Nostr. It involves user-controlled data (think decentralized identity, customizable feeds, etc.) and is designed to work across different services. The protocol enables interoperability, so users can interact with different platforms built on top of it. - *Strengths*: - *Robust framework*: The AT Protocol is designed with user control, scalability, and interoperability in mind. - *Established foundation*: Since it’s backed by Twitter's original founders, Bluesky has strong development resources and early user interest. - *Focus on UX*: Bluesky aims for a polished user experience that might attract users who are more familiar with traditional centralized platforms. - *Weaknesses*: - *Not fully decentralized yet*: While the protocol is decentralized, Bluesky itself is still under development and is not fully distributed in the way Nostr is. - *Centralized governance*: The development of Bluesky is controlled by the Bluesky team, though they aim for a decentralized model over time.
### *Key Differences*: 1. *Complexity & Flexibility*: Nostr is more minimal and flexible, leaving a lot of the development to third-party apps. Bluesky's AT Protocol is more structured with a clear focus on user control and interoperability. 2. *Decentralization*: Nostr is more decentralized by design, with no central authority. Bluesky aims for decentralization but is still more centralized, especially during its early stages. 3. *Use Cases*: Nostr is a pure communication protocol, meaning apps built on it can range from simple messaging to fully-featured social platforms. Bluesky is more focused on social networking with an emphasis on user autonomy and privacy.
If you're looking for raw, censorship-resistant communication with flexibility, Nostr might be more appealing. But if you're after a polished, scalable social network with decentralized features and future growth, Bluesky could be the better fit.
TikTok competitor must have a functional live tool for users with over x amount of followers. Lives are very popular. Gifting cuts also help company revenues.
pixelfed looks like it's even worse at being user-friendly and approachable at all than mastodon, and it currently has all the same old problems mastodon did. user journey, onboarding, ease of use, are like they didn't even learn from mistakes of others. going to pixelfed website and then trying to get to a profile of someone tells me a lot about the state of that experience, when it can't even get the basics of basics right. (like, how to get to a profile on a such network. bizarrely, they don't show full handles with instance name in them, even though it simply doesn't work in a way that'd let you get to some profile through just the username alone from every server. you cannot even access profiles in a consistent and straightforward way.) honestly, hopefully it doesn't take off, cause it seems just mostly user hostile. even though it's free in some ways, it's just not better at being usable.
> like, how to get to a profile on a such network. bizarrely, they don't show full handles
You click on the author's name? I'm confused what the problem is. Also if you're looking at the discovery feed for an instance, you'll see only local posts, so there's no point in adding the domain on that view.
the problem (with just their web version i guess) is not showing the full username with instance where that user is at, nor recognizing when a username with an instance address appended is typed in. so when someone shares just their username (which is all they see on their profile, kinda deceptively cause you do need the instance address to get to someone), you're left guessing which instance they could be in. (the web version is also gated to hell behind sign up/login walls. well, whatever. i'm not going to find out if it's magically better if you cave, if it's this rickety without logging in)
it's insane to me that for a federated network they couldn't get @handle display and profile sharing right.
> so when someone shares just their username
Is that something that actually happens often? You're saying that you're not a user currently, but I can tell you that I've never seen that in practice. Everyone either appends the domain or shares the profile link like https://pixelfed.social/arkadiusz
I mean, it's exactly as with email. We don't get the "you told me it's foobar, but I don't know which domain" issue there, even though most mail clients don't go out of their way to display your full email address.
i'm literally seeing people have those problems, which is why i'm writing about them lol. seeing people share their username and struggle to figure out which server they're at, either while trying to find someone, or even figuring that about themselves. all because pixelfed tries to be cute and doesn't show the full exact @ one would need to get to someone, but trims it just to the local username.
it doesn't inform their users that just username isn't enough, and that they need a full link (with web apps and the whole situation being 'get to anyone from anywhere' it is not intuitive that they need a whole link and not just the @ part in it), and doesn't show a full handle either (which is kinda spotty with where you can put it anyway, because you can't just enter a full handle in url of any instance and get there)
i guess this is just a fediverse convention for showing usernames, but it just ends up creating 'i can't find someone' problems. mastodon, for one, shows server name next to someone's username (and a tooltip with their full handle), but pixelfed doesn't. which is a bizarre choice for a federated service, cause it's counterproductive to federated connections.