Loops aims to be an open Fediverse alternative to TikTok, Snapchat, and Vine. We take an early look at the app, and talk about what it’s like!
You must log in or register to comment.
If I understand it right… it will be much more costly to host videocentric platform than other types of content. A serious proposal for sharing the burden of hosting will likely be vital - through funding or decentralized storage/processing. Havent heard about that yet.
I wonder about this a lot. The little research I did suggested DigitalOcean is footing the bill for the moment (and also for Pixelfed? would love to hear more about this). Google, Facebook, TikTok, etc… have all managed to throw enough resources at similar products that people expect a level of performance that is very expensive to maintain. There is some serious hardware and distribution issues ($$$$) with trying to host an “instant and endless stream of short form video”.
In a counter point though I think large instances like lemmy.world and lemmy.ml have found ways to survive and thrive and the fediverse generally seems to be supported in a very grassroots sort of fashion. Donations, patrons, people who have the hardware and bandwidth sharing what they can for the greater community. Perhaps loops will go the same way.
the bottleneck to peertube seems to be populating and having more viewers, not hosting costs.
not sure about peertube audience size, but afaik it does have a serious subsystem of resource sharing.
still waiting for an email about account registration from them.
I got mine within a few minutes.
Same
Oh nice, the Android app is out!
I can give it a try now
Link to download page for those that have been onboarded: https://loops.video/dashboard/get-the-app
Edit: it feels very smooth
How did you get an account?
Signed up on loops.video a couple weeks ago
Yeah the app seems quite polished already around the video viewing experience at least. Wonder how it populates the default feed.
Yeah since there is little content I can’t tell if there is an algorithm or not.
Edit; I tried posting myself to see and the “feed” is a “new” feed of posts by everyone. So no sort of algorithm at all or any customisation available atleast on the ios app, as of now.
It’s making me login to see that page
I downloaded it without needing an account first (You do need an account to use the actual app), maybe just go on loops.video
The app is good, however what makes the other platforms good is their algorithm and the content that is available. If those are missing (and they likely will for privacy reasons) there’s little reason for me to use it instead of instagram reels or tiktok for example.
not having it be littered by bigots and have an add every 4 scrolls, along with better privacy, is probably the reason why.
I mean… maybe? Those are nice things of course, but if I wanted to start using an alternative to TikTok I would never consider something without an algorithm. The whole point - for me at least - is to waste time eating digital slop served to you by an algorithm so that you don’t have to know what you want to watch when you sit down and open it up. If I already knew what I wanted to watch I wouldn’t be on an app like this, I’d be searching up the video or subject on another platform.
