Out of curiosity is there a FOSS (add-free) short form video type social media?

FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone to Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org – 19 points –

I know of peertube, which is similar to youtube.

But is there anything that is similar to instgram reels, tiktok type stuff.

I imagine it doesn’t exist because the hosting costs would be exorbitant, but I’m curious incase something like it does?

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I don't understand the need really. I mean there is no minimum size. seems like it just need a duration option in search.

The difference is in the user demographic. You can't have an algorithm to satisfy both the YouTube audience and the TikTok audience.

Dont know if it's a good idea to implement that in anyways, shorts/verticals formats are not meant to be profitable to people, too short to learn anything only to make money of it

IIRC Vine and Coub made it mainstream more than 12 years ago, it's not something new. Gifs are basically a prequel of the format.

If people wouldn't like it, it wouldn't survive this long, and wouldn't be copied by every other company and requested in threads like this. It's alright if you don't like them but please let other people have fun. You don't have to "learn" from everything, it's just jokes and light entertainment.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point here (I have no idea why people engage with shorts, maybe they do love that format) but I wanted to push back a little on the idea that a product must be popular simply because corporations continue to offer them. Especially with social media, where users are actively discouraged from making their own decisions as much as possible by The Algorithm.

I think there are plenty of examples of things that people continue to use (and often even pay for the "privilege") despite major aspects of those things being generally reviled by everyone who uses them:

  • ad infested apps and websites
  • gaming microtransactions
  • a new phone every year
  • cable service
  • insurance
  • HOAs
  • gasoline
  • Amazon
  • pants and dresses without pockets

I think the reason is because its easier to consume when you only have 2 minutes in a queue. Not enough time to read something

And for people who don't read

Yeah why did vine fail but tiktok take off? I never understood that

The announcement comes after Twitter announced across-the-board job cuts earlier on Thursday, with plans to lay off 9 percent of its workforce, which equals about 350 people. The company also said in a letter to shareholders that it was going to prioritize some parts of its business, while deprioritizing others.

Source

Twitter was financially in a bad shape for a long time, the first year they generated some profit was 2018. Source Vine existed 2012-2017, I think they couldn't figure out how to monetize it. Twitter was a text based platform, tiktok was designed for video from conception.

But I still don't know why they didn't try to sell it instead of shutting it down.

Coub was also nearly shut down in 2022, it seems like it's hard to profitably maintain a short video service.

One more thing could have an important impact was music rights. Tiktok has special deals with record labels for background music, Coub was Russian, so they could just pirate music. Streaming wasn't big back than, only spotify existed, labels couldn't figure yet out how to milk internet users, so I guess Vine couldn't get as good deals as it would now. Too early, too legal.

I think peertube needs shortd and mobile apps desperately to fill this void.

There was supposed to be goldfish, but I'm not sure what happened to it.

I love stux, I have a Mastodon account on one of his instances, and I donate every now and then. he's a good human being, and his cats are supreme.

that being said, I feel like sometimes he's a bit ADHD with his side projects, so he creates one, and then just lets it fizzle out over time while he starts two new ones. goldfish.social was one of them, and it looks like the domain has expired and got bought out by someone else. perhaps it's his way of learning new stuff, or preventing himself on getting burned out or something - whichever it is, I'm not judging, he's never making promises that they're long term commitments anyway. his Masto instances have been solid, on the other hand.

Developer bailed on it, and it got dumped on someone without the resources to carry on with it, so they've put it into maintenance mode until February next year IIRC? Then it will be gone.

Honestly I'm just glad they're actually doing the maintenance thing instead of just vanishing overnight, or just leaving everything in limbo, which seems to be a problem in this space.

None of that is correct. I was thinking of Firefish

Have a look at loops.video, I think the ambition is for it to be an Activity Pub tiktok clone

Meanwhile I want more Foss video host services that do have ads. If I'm going to be archiving video footage somewhere, I want to know they can pay their bills