鴉PieFedFirst Look: Loops, by Pixelfed
submitted 3 weeks ago by
Sean Tilley@lemmy.world
edited 3 weeks ago
wedistribute.org/2024/11/loops-early-look/
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!
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 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.
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.
still waiting for an email about account registration from them.
I got mine within a few minutes.
i am so happy for you. unfortunately i am still waiting.
update: I am in! hooray!
(app looks clean af as well)
Same
Oh nice, the Android app is out!
I can give it a try now
Link to download page within the account settings, for those that have been onboarded already: https://loops.video/dashboard/get-the-app
Edit: it feels very smooth
Yeah the app seems quite polished already around the video viewing experience at least. Wonder how it populates the default feed.
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
How did you get an account?
v smooth. too smooth. I like it.
Buying into promises is a gamble dependant on the crediblity and trustworthiness of the person/entity making them
Its always a risk putting your faith into a single person, but Dan is the same guy who built Pixelfed. He's a Fediverse OG, literally the exact opposite of a grifter. Trusting him is a risk for sure, but I can't think of many other developers I'd trust more than him (at least in terms of his intentions and determination... I'm not a skilled dev so I can't speak to whether he actually does good work, but Pixelfed seems incredibly legit given the limited resources he's worked with)
Ah thank you! I didn't realize it was made by Dan. In that case Loops is probably a safer bet than the current alternatives👍
No source code and no federation just makes this a worse app with less liability for bad actions. Not sure why he's pushing this before those are ready. Pixelfed itself isn't exactly finished yet.
At a guess, bc the timing might seem right with all the controversy surrounding Tiktok? Knowing that this is out there may increasing the number of contributors to the codebase.
Also I recall clicking on a GitHub page at some point for a front-end web UI for this content, so while the sourcecode of the app itself may not be available yet, there is a way for someone to make their own instance to receive the federated content. I think.
In comparison, the Sublinks project garnered so much attention that the Lemmy.World admins seemed ready to jump onto it the moment that it was halfway ready, but now we haven't heard of any progress whatsoever for months and people seem to have given up hope for it. So communication about a project can be quite important as well as the actual coding itself.
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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.
Still waiting for my account to be activated
Is the Android app out yet?
Yes.
I'm finally got it working, looks great! federation isn't there yet but I'll take it over the mastodon UI for video playback.
Hopefully they implant P2P-CDN , via webtorrent and webrtc to ease bandwidth costs.