In the last few months i really gotten into the whole Fediverse thing, but i noticed that, despite it being the most popular Social Media Platform, there isn’t a TikTok alternative. I know there is Loops, but it’s not open source or federated yet, so it’s not really an option. Why is that?

  • Anthony [She/Her/They/Them]OPAEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    Streaming one video for several minutes, and skipping between numerous videos every couple of seconds, is orders of magnitude more expensive. Video compression works on the idea that you store entire pictures rarely, and then just encode the difference between each frame. When you constantly need the start of videos, you constantly need the full picture of the first frame. This induces a much higher bandwidth requirement than with video that streams for several minutes continuously. Also consider the response time that is required to make the TikTok experience work.

    Yeah, it would probably have to load the next 5-10 Videos in advance, and probably even continue sharing the last 5-10 to make the torrenting work properly. And the bandwidth use would be even higher this way… It would be possible to use even more advanced compression algorithms than TikTok, but that would require more performance on the clients end, and therefore lock out a lot of old and cheap devices.