Pixelfed introduces Loops, a Short-Form Video App

Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlmod to Fediverse@lemmy.ml – 242 points – Pixelfed introduces Loops, a Short-Form Video App
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The Fediverse might be getting their own mashups of Tiktok, YouTube, and Vine sooner than anyone thought, thanks to the work of one prolific dev spearheading an effort. The best part? He's helping other projects in the space, too.

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Available Soon.

Dansup is well known for making grand announcements and delivering on them very late or never. I think it was more than two years ago that he announced federated groups for Pixelfed and still nothing. So I wouldn't get my hopes up yet.

He is a bit bombastic, and has a habit of biting off more than he can chew sometimes. I think these side-projects are ultimately useful, though, and probably help fend off boredom or burnout. Maybe he gets better at coding and design through doing that, I dunno.

Regardless, he's continues to do a lot of great development work.

@deadsuperhero @nutomic I think the concept of a TikTok on the Fediverse is solid. And if short form videos help to get more people on the Fedi, and engaging with the Fedi, that's a good thing in my book.

i still disagree that we should get as many people as possible on the Fediverse.
That's a good way for this place to become a hateful shit hole like so many other places on the internet.

Aren't we still pretty far from being anywhere near that big?

I think the volume of people ia what killed Mastodon. That place is toxic.

How so? I'm not on it but couldn't you try another instance?

i think he stopped working on groups because mastodon officially announced groups shortly after gis preview. not that they have delivered it yet (release target, q4 2023 - an no word for 2 years now).

He's periodically shown updates on it. From talking to him, there are a number of challenges:

  • Being blocked by other features, like a UI refactor
  • Compatibility with other existing implementations (less of a problem now with the Group Federation FEP by @nutomic@lemmy.ml)
  • Wanting to include Private Groups
  • Bringing in moderation, assignment, and delegation tools for groups.
  • Dealing with unrelated issues pertaining to the day-to-day maintenance
  • Needing to break out new experiments in a branch to see how well an idea actually works

I think the biggest thing is that he probably does spread himself pretty thin at times, and is still learning how to rely on community pull requests and contributions. It can be a really hard thing to do, especially if you feel the need to provide the creative direction for how things ought to work.

I wanted to use his mlencryoted messenger :(

He's still working on his messengers. It's been delayed because of new EU regulations surrounding messaging clients.

Hmm, unless the plan is to have a lot of reposts from TikTok, the real difficulty of these platforms is to have super easy to use video editing tools in the mobile app. And that is really a project all on it's own and requires a entirely different skillset.

You know, that's actually a really good point. Dansup tends to iterate on certain parts of his apps several times over, like how Pixelfed handles image uploads and filters prior to posting. It might be that just going with the simplest possible thing makes sense for right now, until a better approach can be devised.

Oh this is fantastic. It's definitely something that's been missing and been a conundrum in regards to figuring out how to sort it. Glad to see the PixelFed developer figured out how to do it.

Hmh, not my cup of tea, but more variety is good, I think. Though hosting a popular instance might get pretty expensive.

They are going to need an algorithm if they want to keep people. The whole fediverse needs it for that matter. It makes for less work for the user base. User chosen or created is fine, but they need it.

You were supposed to bring balance to the Fediverse, not destroy it

Normies love short videos and I think this is a good alternative.

how much would it cost to provide this endless stream of media? im guessing it would be very costly.