Its website says the platform will remain “impartial” to political agendas, won’t shadowban users or content, and will “uphold social responsibility.”
I don’t feel, in this day and age, like you can be politically impartial (i.e. allow fascists to use your platform to spread propaganda) while simultaneously upholding social responsibility (i.e. not allow fascists to use your platform to spread propaganda).
Yeah, I gave it a shot. I opened the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews are secretly ruling the world” conspiracy theory post from a user named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews… Okay, maybe a fluke. Not a great first impression, but let’s see what else the app has to offer. Then a few posts later there was a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post.
So yeah, it has definitely fallen prey to the Nazi Bar problem.
Isn’t this almost exactly what Elon said?
I tried it for an hour or so and it’s absolutely filled with Nazis. One of them was criticizing Elon Musk and Trump for not being nazi enough. No thanks.
An app made by a Palestinian guy who’s very much politically active participating in a no censorship gimmick? This was always the inevitable end result.
No, it wasn’t. It just needs content moderation. There’s zero reason for a Palestinian guy to platform white supremacists.
The lack of moderation from what I can see is on purpose
Best app yet, but eventually that app is gonna get bought out just like TikTok and eventually it will get censored.
Why would anyone use TikTok or any clone like that to begin with? Do they want their brain to rot?
Anything to get that dopamine drip from the Black Rectangle
You say on another dopamine drop website
Oh i know
I’m more blaming the system than the user. The system is designed to be as addicting as possible. Literally a century of addiction research into drugs and gambling, all used to squeeze every drop of engagement from the user
To a point. At least we’re reading and using our brains more on these text-based sites!
Literally never heard of the website until today, this article is wildly overexaggerating
I mean, it’s charted #1 on social media on the app stores. It’s an explosive rise in popularity, but that’s not unheard of. If anything, I suspect that the popularity is manufactured. It’s likely some company running an astroturf campaign to capitalize on the fact that people are tired of TikTok’s censorship BS.
Or people are just tired of zionist propaganda and want to support a palestinian made app
The Palestinian made app is unironically a hub for nazis and islamists
My big concern right now is actually the fact that the “no censorship” part is already being weaponized by Nazis. I suspect it will quickly fall prey to the Nazi Bar Problem. I gave the app a fair shot. Opened it up, and the very first post was a “the Jews are secretly running the world” post from an account named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews. It had a caricature of a Jew (big nose, long sideburns, and yarmulka) reaching out of a TV to steal a watcher’s brain.
Okay, not a great first impression, but that’s inevitable on a free speech app. Let’s keep scrolling. Three or four more posts down, and I was met with a “Hitler was right about the jews” post. Yikes. The fact that those were up front and center (on the default “Ranked” sort) for my brand new account was… Not a great sign.
Time will tell. I do hope it succeeds, because TikTok is clearly an awful choice. But it needs to succeed for the right reasons, and not just become a Nazi cesspit.
Edit: I just opened the app again after posting this comment, and the second post on my feed was a white pride “they’re trying to replace us/white genocide” (common white power talking point to recruit new members) post:
Edit 2: Looking at the account’s follower list, it looks like users are largely using the Palestinian genocide to justify Nazi imagery. Equating Israel’s actions with Jews in general. There are a few straight up Hitler glorification accounts on the follower list, which have “the Jews are genociding Palestine” types of posts right alongside 1488 posts, swastikas, and Nazi salutes. Here is a quick screenshot of some of the followers:
And here is a screenshot of how those followers are using the Palestinian genocide to justify the holocaust:
The upper post is a bunch of dead Palestinian kids and babies lined up in a row. The lower post is obvious. Both (re)posted by the same @HitlerTheHero account.Jesus fucking Christ.
the “no censorship” part is already being weaponized by Nazis.
Yeah, this is the inevitable result with any app that tries the no censorship schtick. It happens every single time, obviously this time won’t be any different.
There is always Loops
Literally anything but FOSS, huh?
Out of the frying pan and into a cold frying pan.
FOSS is just too much of a hassle for most people, unfortunately.
It unironically is, and it’s not entirely the fault of the users either. The average person doesn’t know what FOSS means, what instances are, or what a federated service is and many platforms do a poor job of explaining what those things are and why they are superior.
Additionally, people need to understand that FOSS is not a selling point to the average user and that throwing that term around will go in one ear and out the other. As far as they are concerned their apps are already free because they don’t have to pay a transactional monetary value for them and “open source” is beyond meaningless to them and they couldn’t care less.
Here’s an idea. How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely, and stop rewarding them with excessive device permissions and personal data.
Device permissions? That’s not the issue. I think people just lack software knowledge and should learn the difference between proprietary software and Libre software.
If people understood how to check the software license and determine if it’s a free software license, that would cover almost everything they need to do to help us stop having this problem with picking the wrong software.
We need brainrot on Lemmy
Tralalero
🦈👟
How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely
In my day, we listened to AM Talk Radio! 16 hours a day, to and from work! None of this prissy little short form phone slop, no sir. It was three hour long shifts of Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht, and Sean Hannity. I earned my hate honestly, by fiddling with a little dial on my walkman and getting five commercials about cigars and dick pills every eight minutes. I got to hear bad riff tracks about how Japan was taking over our economy produced on a AKAI S900 that had been dropped down a flight of stairs. I didn’t know these people even had faces until Limbaugh showed up as a talking head for the NFL for a few months.
The very fucking idea that these stupid petulant spoiled woke lib fuck-around find-out kids are getting their news from a five minute long vertical visual display? OOOOOOOOoh it makes me SO MAD! I hate 'dem kids. I hate’m!!!
You know that you could be against both, right?
Are these people unaware that YouTube Shorts is a thing?
The attraction to tt was the algorithm. Yt’s algo is garbo. Yt just gives you more of the same, whereas tt would magically align you with your people and your needs. Yt is sorta trying to do that right now, but it’s all from spying on you, rather than algorithmically.
It’s like the difference between having a conversation with somebody irl about having itchy feet and then suddenly your algorithm is filled with ads for views cures for itchy feet, vs slowly figuring out that you’re neurodivergent, and then through watch time and liked comments, starting to feed you stuff that other people like you like, and you end up in whatever corner that is most useful to you.
It’s the difference between your platform ONLY being one video at a time and the devs HAVE to figure out what you MIGHT like, vs a platform that feeds you choices and a feed and tries to guess your categories and shit. It’s very, very different, and imo tt was much, much better.
It’s funny but, when people talk about what tiktok is just x-thing, they’re really really telling on themselves. Like if people say it’s just slop or teens dancing, it’s pretty well known, at least to people who have USED tiktok, that that’s really fucking bad unless the person is themselves a teen. Unfortunately, it’s usually a conservative senator or someone’s dad and it’s just eewwwww
Yt just gives you more of the same, whereas tt would magically align you with your people and your needs.
That sounds like the exact same thing to me but slower. And you seem to be implying that TikTok doesn’t spy on you, which I highly doubt.
Oh come on. Another centralised social media service that could be compromised. Wtf is wrong with these people
Is there a federated/decentralized version of tiktok? Right now would be the perfect time to implement one of these.
Loops.
However, of a dozen instances that exist, only the main one - loops.video - functions well and serves a diversity of content. It’s still in heavy development, but technically, ActivityPub is already included.
Account created
Suspended instantly
So much for open web heh
You probably used a VPN or privacy browser. Social media platforms are terrified of bots and will punish a poor Recaptcha V3 or similar score without telling you.
Which is like half the people interested in grassrootsing a place like this
It is possible to be private without being suspicious by using a stock Firefox or Brave profile on mobile data.
Brave regularly gets me flagged as a bot on Android
I think it’s hard to host a video-focused social media on the fediverse, I imagine it would have a high cost to maintain.
Build it on top of Bittorrent. If you like a post, you’re seeding it. When you want to stop seeding it, your like goes away.
Then popular things will have a large pool of seeds mitigating much of the bandwidth cost to the instance host.
With the side effect of making manipulating the voting algorithm with bots a lot more expensive.
I think people would be pretty quickly upset by the batter and storage drain from this. I have to imagine if picking an instance is a barrier to mastodon, most folks are not interested enough to learn the mechanics of why likes suddenly use system resources, and see it as a failing of the app.
I don’t see any other choices other than:
- You host it yourself. (Peer to Peer social media)
- You pay someone else to host it for you. (Instanced social media)
- You trade your digital freedom, privacy and political stability of your country to someone else to host it for you. (Meta, X, TikTok)
3 hasn’t been working out so far and people really don’t want to have to pay another subscription. So you can spend your battery life and data instead. Maybe setup the service so that other people can seed on your behalf, so you could use your own resources or pay for someone elses all in the same ecosystem.
Peertube does a similar thing, using bittorrent to share the load, but it only works while you’re actively watching the video so outside of very popular videos it is usually just the instance who is providing bandwidth. By tying the data sharing directly into the primary interaction method it creates a much larger pool of peers and, eventually, once everyone stops seeding it the data stops existing.
No permanent record of everything you’ve ever posted, no central repository of data to be hoovered up by the AI startup who pays off the instance owner, no empowering a single person to control all of social media for their own selfish ends.
I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.
I think instanced makes the most sense, and even that would be a hard ask if popularity every spikes.
I think the fact that Peertube which I think of as more a PC interface, where bandwidth and power consumption are less an issue, but still chooses to limit the peer connections to active watching speaks to how discordant the idea is with what people expect from streaming media.
I would happily use a desktop app as you described, so if it ever exists, let me know 😁
I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.
The tech is already most of the way there.
Consider this.
There is already a type of community that has developed sets of rules and incentive structures such that they have created a distributed service with petabytes of storage for content and gigabits of excess bandwidth for delivery.
This service is in such demand that people will voluntarily study for and take a test (waiting hours in line for their 1 on 1 interview/test). This is in addition to their buying/renting their own storage and bandwidth and adding it to the pool that comprises this service. Much more work than plugging a phone in to charge!
What I’m describing is a private bittorrent tracker community.
They’ve created a scalable, peer to peer, media storage and retrieval service (for public domain videos and music, which are the best) where you’re required to contribute AT LEAST as much as you take (1.0 share ratio).
In addition, by publicly displaying the upload/download statistics about a user’s account it has turned into a source of social credit. People seed massively in excess of what they will every download in order to have the highest ratio. The social systems and norms are aligned with the good of the service.
People love the high ratio people, after all everyone loves downloading a 85GB 4k HDR+ copy of It’s a Wonderful Life at 15gbps, that’s only possible because Joe Ratio has a seedbox on a 50Gb connection serving up classic movies(super classic and old) for clout.
You don’t even have to worry about having movies downloaded in advance when you can just have your seedbox grab your favorite Charlie Chaplain movie and have it available for streaming directly from the seedbox in less time than it takes to grab a glass of water.
Take the model of a public tracker and create a decentralized messaging system around it (I think there is one or two projects like that already floating around but the names escape me). Bittorrent already has a distributed hash table (DHT) service which can completely replace a centrally hosted tracker or run along-side hosted trackers.
You are also right that it would have to be easy, but that’s possible. Signal has some of the most advanced encryption systems available but to the average user it’s just text messaging. There are some talented frontend developers and UX designers out there but that’s not my lane and I have confidence in them.
It’s a neat idea to think about, at least
I am aware of private trackers. I guess to me, even in the space of “it’s neat to think about” something like Loops and built on activity pub makes more sense.
Now if we imagined folks offering home hardware or ‘seed boxes’ to help an instance out, that I could see being useful tech, but constantly uploading from your phone seems a bit silly.
