First Look: Loops, by Pixelfed – Decentralised TikTok Competitor (2024)
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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.
The platform is important but the content creators and the viewers are 10x more important.
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.
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.
We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore.
> 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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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'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?
If you scroll extremely fast through videos, you'll always get a short moment where it's loading after the same number of videos.
It's an alternative, one which the world would be way better off adopting, but far from being a competitor, unfortunately.
I wonder though if the "decentralised" thing is really a feature for the audience that tiktok serves.
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
If a project serves someone well, then it's competitive for that person.
while many gnu projects and linux itself started just like that
It feels very hard to find any sort of information on "Loops". Especially regarding their decentralization model.
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)
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”?
- 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.
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.
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.
And for producers, yet another ticket to continue engaging in the capitalist system for the sake of capitalism itself.
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.
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".
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.
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 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.
Funny, I can't find the guy I really like, but -- stuff like this:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/young-tiktok-users-making-activism...
I hope this takes off though.
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.
It doesn’t bill itself as a social network though. Neither does TikTok seem to.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The trick is to get high enough numbers of users to use the platform though.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250123192931/https://wedistrib...
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.
+ Viable income for content creators
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.
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?
Under no circumstances should we let AI filter the fediverse. Freedom is worth more than mild offense.
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 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.
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.
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.
Abandoned? I don’t think that’s accurate at all.
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 guess it’s a good sign in a way. Shows that people are interested.
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.
I think Bluesky's ATP can support that, not sure about ActivityPub, but it probably can 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
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?
### *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.
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.
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.
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.
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.