First Look: Loops, by Pixelfed
First Look: Loops, by Pixelfed
Loops is a Fediverse TikTok alternative by the creator of Pixelfed. We try the app out for a spin, and give our honest thoughts.
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!
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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.
the bottleneck to peertube seems to be populating and having more viewers, not hosting costs.
The problem with Peertube, IMO, is you can't just "join".
Pick an instance, it's locked down. I get it, hosting others video content is costly and dangerous, but it's also a huge barrier.
It's best use case is self-hosting by established creators funded primarily by patreon subscribers, rather than new creators. But established creators won't abandon the platform with their viewers. So, it's a bit of a jam.
Fediverse platforms also just seem terribly uninterested in supporting creatives' business models, so we get a high minded desert.
Its true, but we do also have a proven base of both users and experienced admins that has proven to be resilient and self-sustaining even in the world where the winds of capitalism or VC money aren't throttling growth.
To me, an alternative model would be deep-linking/embedding 3rd party videos that you own.
For instance, sign up at @server, then:
- Connect your YouTube account
- Post Video 1 to YouTube
- You now have a Video 1 in your federated feed with a YouTube embed
- Connect your Vimeo account
- Post Video 1 to Vimeo (same hash and/or title)
- Your feed entry of Video 1 is updated to support both back end videos
This way your "feed" is federated, but the efficiency of centralized video content is used. If a provider goes down, or you choose to leave, you can re-up to another provider and with the connected account/title matching, your feed could be auto-updated.
That’s a very interesting idea. It might also incentivize creators because it gives them a more stable audience that’s at least a little insured against viewership changes on any single platform due to changes in that platform outside of their control.
not sure about peertube audience size, but afaik it does have a serious subsystem of resource sharing.
Object Storage is relatively cheap, and goes a long way towards affordable hosting. Processing video, on the other hand...
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 videos get automatically deleted after some time.
The very first Youtube video is still up. Any serious competitor is going to need to offer that level of reliability with added benefits to woo users over.
have you considered that a platform for sharing short, vertical videos, developed by a single person, perhaps isn't trying to become a "serious competitor" for Youtube?
Loops isn't competing with youtube. I doubt you would be able to find the first tiktok.
YouTube can't even keep up with the amount of 4k and 8k video being fed into it.
what you're seeing with ads is them trying to reduce their burden.