Who actually wants this? Kids obsesses with TikTok don't care about federated/open source bits. People who do are not on TikTok or interested in this type of brainrot in the first place.
TikTok has ~1.59 billion global active users, if you go to Cambodia you will have a hard time not seeing it in the wild. It is painful that this is still seen as some teen trend.
People enjoy short form video, people should be able to enjoy things they like with dignity, which is in extremely short supply on algorithm and advert driven social media.
Loops is nice because it isn't algorithm oriented. You can follow folks and just see their things if you like, or see whats on the instance.
Loops doesn't need to 'slay tiktok' Loops just needs to grow organically and support the niches that feel like using it, and it can take the time to do that at any pace. Its success is not determined by user numbers or series rounds.
I don't like to produce short form video, but its been nice to now follow a few people on Loops from Mastodon. Its nice that the Fediverse allows multiple forms of expression.
> People enjoy short form video, people should be able to enjoy things they like with dignity, which is in extremely short supply on algorithm and advert driven social media.
People “enjoy” heroin, crack cocaine, fentanyl too, should they “enjoy” them with dignity too?
Yes, of course. That’s what Portugal’s drug policy did. By allowing a path for doing hard drugs safely and with dignity, you also allow a path for conversation, getting help, and leaving them behind.
Both in the case of drugs and short form vertical video.
There's a lot of stuff which may loosely be termed "vices", e.g. alcohol and gambling, which have the property:
- many people never touch
- many people indulge without significant harm, getting enjoyment from the process
- some people over indulge messily
- a few people get their lives completely ruined, or ruin the lives of those around them
Then there's an uncomfortable, unreconcilable tension between the desire to punish/prevent the last group by banning the thing, versus the second group entirely reasonably saying that it's not a problem for them.
To be fair, sobriety has the same property; so does feature-length landscape-oriented cinema; so does involvement in religious and political affairs.
Many things that people get up to ostensibly "of their own accord" have these four groups of outcomes, in different proportions. Makes you figure.
I'm of the opinion that the main problem has always been the increasing powerlessness of the individual in the face of mass social phenomena that camouflage as "your life now" but are instead someone's viral PR campaign. In Germany this stuff passed in 10ish years, in Russia it passed in 80ish; California still countin'
That discussion is already over since, what... 20 years? Heroin addicts get their fix from the state, with tax payer money, in many many countries these days. I can see the line waiting in front of my pharmacy every day in the morning...
Sure I do. I don’t have a say in how they spend their time, but if I catch a whiff that someone is doing hard drugs for fun then I’m going to treat them differently than someone addicted and going through a rehab.
Ah yes, a reply in true hacker fashion, if people only were that binary. Just don't use, then addiction wouldn't be a thing! Problem solved. We can see it all around, the now 55 years war on drugs has been a great success!
I'm not sure if you ever had to deal with someone addicted close to you, but it is heartbreaking. They are already ashamed of themselves and suffer. The last thing you want to do is take away their dignity, because that shuts them out and puts the path to recovery even further. They are still humans you know, just with a problem. They need help, not a trashing. That they are already doing to themselves.
That’s what I said, though? If they’re addicted and working on their addiction – there’s a medical reason why they do it. If they’re shooting heroin for fun, then they’ll get nothing but scorn from me.
Watching all these open source, federated versions of social media platforms is like if you found out your favourite drug was actually manufactured by some really bad people and made people around the world suffer. So you make an open source version of the drug. Similar formula, just this time the people can own it.
Sure you cut out the bad people, but is the situation improved now?
There are projects where long term addicts are given pure medical heroin (Diamorphin) in a controlled environment, and they do considerably better than their control group who does not receive their drugs like that.
Their drug is rage, thirst and cute trap videos generated by AI and selected for maximum engagement.
If it's not harmful it's not the same drug. Unlike diamorphine, a medical grade supply does not reduce harm; it's more like sniffing glue, inhaling poison to escape reality.
The harm from social media is at least in part caused by the feed suggestion algorithm being optimized for screen time (aka addiction). Potentially open social media where the suggestion algorithm is not that could be a big improvement.
Long overdue in fact. But then perhaps heroin wouldn’t be illegal if it was big pharma was producing it in large quantities. It just got barred early enough. Besides why we always forget how addictive and damaging is the well available alcohol?
Alcohol has fucked up more lives than any other drug in my sphere. People who have had their life fucked by drugs has mostly been because of inhumane government intervention.
Yeah the legal thing used by people many magnitudes more than hard illegal drugs had an effect on more people than something used by a relatively small minority will impact more people you know.
How many heroin users do you know who manage to only have 1-2 hits a week socially though and hold down a career.
The most apparent addictions that ruin precious lives everywhere around us, in every country, are freely available because "eyes wide open" and most of the times - intentional misinformation (you can think of it also as tradition).
Add to these tobacco if you want. Nicotine on its won as a standalone agent is perhaps no more damaging than caffeine, but is used in a form-factor that really grills one's lungs.
for example - Russian influenced Balkan areas all take drinking of vodka as something super normal.
Heroin was produced in huge quantities and it was a very popular drug for many ailments, including cough, asthma, insomnia and calming down children. It declined only after the 1912 International Opium Convention. In Finland it was a popular cough suppressant until the 1950s. In e.g. UK it's still used for severe pain.
Heroin (diamorphine) as a molecule isn't really substantially more problematic than e.g. oxycodone or fentanyl, which are in widespread medical use. The specific ban of heroin is more a historical contingency.
That would be great, also I'd like to make advertising in public spaces with LED billboards illegal. But once politicians start using the form of media to get votes it's basically game over.
The parent comment explained why they dismissed this in clear language. Yours is a random weird comparison to Dropbox (how is it related to this post? Which side is Dropbox, TikTok or Loops?)
I believe GP is referencing this classic comment from 2007 on Drew's original Show HN post for Dropbox:
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
I think this is a reference to when Dropbox was first introduced. I recall posts dismissing it as “just something that could be done as well with a bash script”.
> Yeah I can make a dropbox clone in a one-liner bash command too
Jesus, is this the only argument you people have now? Some decade old comment of a non-business guy?
Parent is right, loops removes precisely what makes TikTok addicting. It’s like removing heroin high for addicts – what’s the point of the injection, then?
What you’re missing is that there’s maybe a bigger crossover between people (and age groups) who use TikTok and people who might prefer it if they weren’t tracked and monetised, than you are imagining.
My experience is that TikTok’e algorithm is so good it largely reflects the individual user. My feed is 99% wholesome - presumably because that’s how I’ve trained it over time. I’m amazed by other people’s stories of bad TikTok - just not my experience.
I think that group of people if very small, but overrepresented on sites like this. Regular people just don't care. They _might_ pay to remove ads, but because they are annoying not because they are afraid of tracking or being monetized.
I agree that HN is not representative, but amongst my definitely-not-tech-aware friends, there's certainty awareness about privacy and social media. This might manifest in avoiding specific apps (for example, I have a friend who refuses to install TikTok, despite being active in Instagram) or strict controls of their children's use.
There's another group who don't necessarily take any action immediately, but might switch if there was a competitive alternative. But of course there's a network effect: being an early adopter of Signal (over Whatsapp) was lonely but eventually enough people came along. Bluesky is doing okay vs. Twitter. Without people trying to offer an alternative, nothing will ever change.
A lot of older (even elderly) people watch TikTok and other short form video streams, e.g. Instagram or YouTube shorts. But I wouldn't put past kids caring about such things either.
I noticed that some lemmy instances and channels are managed in the same way Facebook and Reddit groups are - by corporations, using many bot accounts that fake user behavior/anctivity and make echo chamber environment.
So if corpo approach was compromised why not migrate the plethora of experience and knowledge to another platform to continue brainwashing disguised as marketing strategy and facilitation.
TikTok is brainrot the same way YouTube is brainrot is the same way TV is brainrot is the same way moving pictures are brainrot. The medium is not the message. (I.e. TikTok is damn good)
People enjoy short form video, people should be able to enjoy things they like with dignity, which is in extremely short supply on algorithm and advert driven social media.
Loops is nice because it isn't algorithm oriented. You can follow folks and just see their things if you like, or see whats on the instance.
Loops doesn't need to 'slay tiktok' Loops just needs to grow organically and support the niches that feel like using it, and it can take the time to do that at any pace. Its success is not determined by user numbers or series rounds.
I don't like to produce short form video, but its been nice to now follow a few people on Loops from Mastodon. Its nice that the Fediverse allows multiple forms of expression.