The fuck is UpScrolled? I thought the consensus was to use RedNote?
How many quick short videos can one consume before they become tired of them? What is the bizarre appeal to that crap instead of actually doing something?
Yes I am typing here on Lemmy, you could make an argument, but damn you see ten short videos you have seen them all.
For me it’s news snippets, recipe ideas, 3d print ideas, and short form comedy. I look at it maybe 15min daily. Sometimes days without. My wife probably does 2hrs a day (stay home mother, homeschool teacher, honored caregiver). For her it’s the entertainment that can be quickly put down, little investment involved.
Literally never heard of the website until today, this article is wildly overexaggerating
This advertisement is exaggerating, I would say.
I mean, it’s charted #1 on social media on the app stores. It’s an explosive rise in popularity, but that’s not unheard of. If anything, I suspect that the popularity is manufactured. It’s likely some company running an astroturf campaign to capitalize on the fact that people are tired of TikTok’s censorship BS.
Or people are just tired of zionist propaganda and want to support a palestinian made app
My big concern right now is actually the fact that the “no censorship” part is already being weaponized by Nazis. I suspect it will quickly fall prey to the Nazi Bar Problem. I gave the app a fair shot. Opened it up, and the very first post was a “the Jews are secretly running the world” post from an account named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews. It had a caricature of a Jew (big nose, long sideburns, and yarmulka) reaching out of a TV to steal a watcher’s brain.
Okay, not a great first impression, but that’s inevitable on a free speech app. Let’s keep scrolling. Three or four more posts down, and I was met with a “Hitler was right about the jews” post. Yikes. The fact that those were up front and center (on the default “Ranked” sort) for my brand new account was… Not a great sign.
Time will tell. I do hope it succeeds, because TikTok is clearly an awful choice. But it needs to succeed for the right reasons, and not just become a Nazi cesspit.
Edit: I just opened the app again after posting this comment, and the second post on my feed was a white pride “they’re trying to replace us/white genocide” (common white power talking point to recruit new members) post:
Its website says the platform will remain “impartial” to political agendas, won’t shadowban users or content, and will “uphold social responsibility.”
I don’t feel, in this day and age, like you can be politically impartial (i.e. allow fascists to use your platform to spread propaganda) while simultaneously upholding social responsibility (i.e. not allow fascists to use your platform to spread propaganda).
Yeah, I gave it a shot. I opened the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews are secretly ruling the world” conspiracy theory post from a user named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews… Okay, maybe a fluke. Not a great first impression, but let’s see what else the app has to offer. Then a few posts later there was a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post.
So yeah, it has definitely fallen prey to the Nazi Bar problem.
You can be arguably impartial. Youre not banning them for being Nazis you’re banning them for all the stuff Nazis do like the racism. I would also argue you shouldn’t be politically impartial and just ban Nazis because Nazis should not feel welcomed.
Does UpScrolled have a web or desktop version?
Currently, UpScrolled is available exclusively as a mobile app — downloadable on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
The app is fully supported on smartphones and tablets, giving you a seamless experience across mobile devices.
Web and desktop version are on our roadmap.
And no doubt the web version will pop up a massive blocker requiring you to make an account to even browse.
That’s a no from me, dog.
I tried it for an hour or so and it’s absolutely filled with Nazis. One of them was criticizing Elon Musk and Trump for not being nazi enough. No thanks.
Here’s an idea. How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely, and stop rewarding them with excessive device permissions and personal data.
We need brainrot on Lemmy
Tralalero
🦈👟
What? No, that’s a horrible idea.
How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely
In my day, we listened to AM Talk Radio! 16 hours a day, to and from work! None of this prissy little short form phone slop, no sir. It was three hour long shifts of Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht, and Sean Hannity. I earned my hate honestly, by fiddling with a little dial on my walkman and getting five commercials about cigars and dick pills every eight minutes. I got to hear bad riff tracks about how Japan was taking over our economy produced on a AKAI S900 that had been dropped down a flight of stairs. I didn’t know these people even had faces until Limbaugh showed up as a talking head for the NFL for a few months.
The very fucking idea that these stupid petulant spoiled woke lib fuck-around find-out kids are getting their news from a five minute long vertical visual display? OOOOOOOOoh it makes me SO MAD! I hate 'dem kids. I hate’m!!!
Those podcasts still exist, too. I think these short form videos are more like amateur magazines, they’re way more fun but flip-side unedited potentially troublesome content
Yeah, let’s not do any of that shit either.
Literally anything but FOSS, huh?
Out of the frying pan and into a cold frying pan.
There’s a FOSS tiktok equivalent?
Loops is the FOSS fediverse equivalent.
FOSS is just too much of a hassle for most people, unfortunately.
It unironically is, and it’s not entirely the fault of the users either. The average person doesn’t know what FOSS means, what instances are, or what a federated service is and many platforms do a poor job of explaining what those things are and why they are superior.
Additionally, people need to understand that FOSS is not a selling point to the average user and that throwing that term around will go in one ear and out the other. As far as they are concerned their apps are already free because they don’t have to pay a transactional monetary value for them and “open source” is beyond meaningless to them and they couldn’t care less.
Plus algorithms suck there.
Oh come on. Another centralised social media service that could be compromised. Wtf is wrong with these people
Any non centralized platform would probably fall under the amount of users, unless they have some special funding
Also, some creators want revenue and shit… and decentralized platforms don’t allow creators to earn money
Is there a federated/decentralized version of tiktok? Right now would be the perfect time to implement one of these.
Loops.
However, of a dozen instances that exist, only the main one - loops.video - functions well and serves a diversity of content. It’s still in heavy development, but technically, ActivityPub is already included.
Account created
Suspended instantly
So much for open web heh
You probably used a VPN or privacy browser. Social media platforms are terrified of bots and will punish a poor Recaptcha V3 or similar score without telling you.
VPN + adblocker + resist fingerprinting + mail alias (Addy) indeed
They have cloudflare captcha which I passed, so they’re being annoying
It could be the mail alias. Most platforms have rules against disposable email addresses.
Which is like half the people interested in grassrootsing a place like this
It is possible to be private without being suspicious by using a stock Firefox or Brave profile on mobile data.
Mobile data is logged though, but yea anonymous from the platform, sure
Brave regularly gets me flagged as a bot on Android
There is but it’s not on any app store yet, not even f-droid
Whats it called?
its that even their app installs is driven by recommendation algorithms of the app store. google will never recommend social media apps to people that don’t try to destroy society
They follow what is advertised. Fediverse, by its nature, doesn’t have money for this. There was a push for Mastodon, though.
When you say there was a push, do you mean there was a time when they did have ads, or do you mean the community push with the twitter troubles?
Majorr tch websites promoted mastodon a lot
The community push, mainly. But there seemed to be a PR campaign to capitalize on it. I don’t know if there were official adverts.
Ah okay, that was my understanding as well. I was curious if anyone had tried making an ad.
99% don’t know what the Fediverse is. I can’t blame them for jumping ship to Upscrolled since it’s what they have heard of.
And me, living in the dark woods of Lemmy and Mastodon, have never, until now, heard of this ‘upscrolled’. I really like my ignorance-laced way of life.
I think it’s hard to host a video-focused social media on the fediverse, I imagine it would have a high cost to maintain.
Also PeerTube
oh damn, I didn’t notice it is open source at first
It wasn’t for a while.
good to know, thanks for the info
Build it on top of Bittorrent. If you like a post, you’re seeding it. When you want to stop seeding it, your like goes away.
Then popular things will have a large pool of seeds mitigating much of the bandwidth cost to the instance host.
With the side effect of making manipulating the voting algorithm with bots a lot more expensive.
I think people would be pretty quickly upset by the batter and storage drain from this. I have to imagine if picking an instance is a barrier to mastodon, most folks are not interested enough to learn the mechanics of why likes suddenly use system resources, and see it as a failing of the app.
Plus the network usage for people with data caps, ISPs who throttle you for any p2p traffic etc it’d be a mess. Not to mention torrents usually have a ‘ramp up’ time as they find and connect to peers, probably not what people used to and endless stream of autoplaying short-form videos would want.
I don’t see any other choices other than:
- You host it yourself. (Peer to Peer social media)
- You pay someone else to host it for you. (Instanced social media)
- You trade your digital freedom, privacy and political stability of your country to someone else to host it for you. (Meta, X, TikTok)
3 hasn’t been working out so far and people really don’t want to have to pay another subscription. So you can spend your battery life and data instead. Maybe setup the service so that other people can seed on your behalf, so you could use your own resources or pay for someone elses all in the same ecosystem.
Peertube does a similar thing, using bittorrent to share the load, but it only works while you’re actively watching the video so outside of very popular videos it is usually just the instance who is providing bandwidth. By tying the data sharing directly into the primary interaction method it creates a much larger pool of peers and, eventually, once everyone stops seeding it the data stops existing.
No permanent record of everything you’ve ever posted, no central repository of data to be hoovered up by the AI startup who pays off the instance owner, no empowering a single person to control all of social media for their own selfish ends.
I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.
I think instanced makes the most sense, and even that would be a hard ask if popularity every spikes.
I think the fact that Peertube which I think of as more a PC interface, where bandwidth and power consumption are less an issue, but still chooses to limit the peer connections to active watching speaks to how discordant the idea is with what people expect from streaming media.
I would happily use a desktop app as you described, so if it ever exists, let me know 😁
I think the answer is AV1. You can get good quality video into 500 NB per hour which is easily affordable with unobtrusive ads like a banner at the bottom of the app and a video ad that can be swapped away every 10 videos.
I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.
The tech is already most of the way there.
Consider this.
There is already a type of community that has developed sets of rules and incentive structures such that they have created a distributed service with petabytes of storage for content and gigabits of excess bandwidth for delivery.
This service is in such demand that people will voluntarily study for and take a test (waiting hours in line for their 1 on 1 interview/test). This is in addition to their buying/renting their own storage and bandwidth and adding it to the pool that comprises this service. Much more work than plugging a phone in to charge!
What I’m describing is a private bittorrent tracker community.
They’ve created a scalable, peer to peer, media storage and retrieval service (for public domain videos and music, which are the best) where you’re required to contribute AT LEAST as much as you take (1.0 share ratio).
In addition, by publicly displaying the upload/download statistics about a user’s account it has turned into a source of social credit. People seed massively in excess of what they will every download in order to have the highest ratio. The social systems and norms are aligned with the good of the service.
People love the high ratio people, after all everyone loves downloading a 85GB 4k HDR+ copy of It’s a Wonderful Life at 15gbps, that’s only possible because Joe Ratio has a seedbox on a 50Gb connection serving up classic movies(super classic and old) for clout.
You don’t even have to worry about having movies downloaded in advance when you can just have your seedbox grab your favorite Charlie Chaplain movie and have it available for streaming directly from the seedbox in less time than it takes to grab a glass of water.
Take the model of a public tracker and create a decentralized messaging system around it (I think there is one or two projects like that already floating around but the names escape me). Bittorrent already has a distributed hash table (DHT) service which can completely replace a centrally hosted tracker or run along-side hosted trackers.
You are also right that it would have to be easy, but that’s possible. Signal has some of the most advanced encryption systems available but to the average user it’s just text messaging. There are some talented frontend developers and UX designers out there but that’s not my lane and I have confidence in them.
It’s a neat idea to think about, at least
I am aware of private trackers. I guess to me, even in the space of “it’s neat to think about” something like Loops and built on activity pub makes more sense.
Now if we imagined folks offering home hardware or ‘seed boxes’ to help an instance out, that I could see being useful tech, but constantly uploading from your phone seems a bit silly.
At least they are showing a willingness to move
Yeah how come they won’t hop to a tankie filled content desert that is Lemmy? Where else will they find Facebook memes and US politics?
Well because why would someone look at Lemmy as a TikTok replacement
Is this like UpDog?
What’s UpDog?
not much, how 'bout you?
Got 'em
This made me lol
Larry Ellison tool over Tiktok to stifle anti israel and pro Palestine voices and the NPCs thought it was all about China.
Told you so.
Are these people unaware that YouTube Shorts is a thing?
youtube shorts get thier content from tiktok. and you can block shorts.
The attraction to tt was the algorithm. Yt’s algo is garbo. Yt just gives you more of the same, whereas tt would magically align you with your people and your needs. Yt is sorta trying to do that right now, but it’s all from spying on you, rather than algorithmically.
It’s like the difference between having a conversation with somebody irl about having itchy feet and then suddenly your algorithm is filled with ads for views cures for itchy feet, vs slowly figuring out that you’re neurodivergent, and then through watch time and liked comments, starting to feed you stuff that other people like you like, and you end up in whatever corner that is most useful to you.
It’s the difference between your platform ONLY being one video at a time and the devs HAVE to figure out what you MIGHT like, vs a platform that feeds you choices and a feed and tries to guess your categories and shit. It’s very, very different, and imo tt was much, much better.
It’s funny but, when people talk about what tiktok is just x-thing, they’re really really telling on themselves. Like if people say it’s just slop or teens dancing, it’s pretty well known, at least to people who have USED tiktok, that that’s really fucking bad unless the person is themselves a teen. Unfortunately, it’s usually a conservative senator or someone’s dad and it’s just eewwwww
Yt just gives you more of the same, whereas tt would magically align you with your people and your needs.
That sounds like the exact same thing to me but slower. And you seem to be implying that TikTok doesn’t spy on you, which I highly doubt.
I am and that is why I actively avoid.
No, they are just keenly aware that YouTube Shorts is shit by comparison.
It’s literally the same thing
but its algorithm is not as addictive, so its shit
That’s the real reason I’m on TikTok… but I’m fine with that
An Australian app, so you can say “Epstein” on this one but still not “stop the genocide and colonisation of Palestine”. At least the hate speech manager (for now) isn’t an ex-IDF Zionist and the platform (for now) is not expressly pro-Israel / pro-genocide.
Isn’t upscrolled created by a Palestinian? I doubt he’d be okay with censoring a genocide against his people.
There is always Loops
You get to watch a couple of videos only without logging in. No search.
Yikes.
No one uses loops. That Dan dude went all in on such a silly thing. Won’t be surprised if itit dies in two years or becomes a zombie project.
Sadly no way to host your own instance yet, but it does look promising.
The git repo has a server installation guide.
IIRC that’s old news and you can now self host and there are other instances up.
Is there any discovery or list of other instances?
There already are quite a few instances actually, but they’re all trash tier for now, except for the dev-operated loops.video
They’re leaving like redditors to Lemmy. There’s dozens of them!
It’s more like Twitter to BlueSky, which was a pinch more.
… and just resets the cycle
You should read TAZ. The cycle is the point. There will never be a forever non toxic platform, but there will always be temporary non toxic periods on platforms. To live fully is to surf from one wave to the other.
OK, but currently it’s at least in the (relatively) good phase of the cycle
They have an account for ICE
