12mo ago

Pixelfed introduces Loops, a Short-Form Video App

wedistribute.org Pixelfed introduces Loops, a Short-Form Video App

Short-form video might in fact be the next frontier for federated media. The dev behind a popular photo-sharing platform is diving in headfirst.

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.

40 comments

Vine 3.0 let's try this again
- This time it's personal!
  
  Wait, we want anonymous

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.
  
  Sup messenger too, but it's on hold due to EU regulatory challenges
  And I agree, Dan is a great asset to fediverse development
- 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.
- Little baby Elon...

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.

Can't wait to never try it.

Well now's the time if TikTok gets banned.
- Perhaps it will be the third great migration?

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.

Maybe it should've been integrated as a part of pixelfed like how reels are on instagram ? Because it can benifit on the aldready existing userbase and would be much less work all the servers have to inrease the file size allotment tho. Maybe that's not those userbase want idk never been there
- So, one interesting aspect here is that you can log into it with your existing Mastodon or Pixelfed account. Loops and Sup both seem to be building on the idea that you can use existing Fediverse accounts to log in, meaning you don't necessarily need to create a new account and navigate a new platform all over again.
  
  Hmm yeah i noticed lemmy is lacking on that idea.

- That's my main concern. Seeing content from other platforms in my Mastodon feed is pretty great right now (Lemmy, PeerTube etc). But hashtag feeds could quickly get overrun by something like this if it works the same way.
  That said, making this its own thing instead of building a "reels" for Pixelfed suggests the dev already knows separation will be important, so 🤞
  
  @thegiddystitcher @helenslunch I think hashtag feeds being overrun with vertical videos is an excellent point. (One I hope @dansup considers!)
  But beyond that, I think vertical videos through Loops on the Fedi are likely to be far less obtrusive than they have been on other platforms.
  What's so annoying about them on Instagram and YouTube is that the algorithm automatically drops vertical videos into my feed.
  And there's lots of them in my feed, often on topics I'm not interested in.
  They're not there because I'm interested, but because they serve the commercial interests of the social media app's owners.
  Hashtags aside, on the Fedi, they'll only appear in your feed if you follow a Loops account you're interested in, or someone you follow finds one interesting enough to share.
  And if people on your Mastodon server all find them really annoying, there's always the option to just block the Loops servers and be done with it.

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.