Life is full of these chances, but we seldom take them. Whatever happens with TikTok, it'll be business as usual in no time.
I social web based on RSS would be heaven: publish anywhere you want, own your content and URL, no content moderation, pick your own service (separately) for discovery. Google should be pushing harder for this to bust content back out of the walled gardens of Instagram.
You can already add .rss to the end of someone's Mastodon account to get their posts as a feed (e.g. https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic.rss) and ghost.org is working on their AP integration for longer form content (more info about the beta here https://activitypub.ghost.org/)
I think PeerTube has RSS support too, but I've not experimented with it.
In LJ, if you liked someone's post, you could click on "friends" and see _their_ feed. I've discovered a lot of new blogs this way. There was even "all friends of all friends" page if you really wanted a firehose.
In RSS world, all of this is gone. Sure, one blog I read had a separate "posts I found interesting" feed, and I've discovered some new feeds this way.. but this was only one site, most of the websites had nothing like this.
This stands in stark contrast with US-based social media companies, where both its users and content creators often speak like they're at war with the algorithm, yet to the tech elite these sites algorithms are tuned to perfection.
I couldn't speak for Tiktok's aims, but they seem different enough that its algorithm doesn't chafe in the ways that we've come to expect.
Who is they?
Anyway, you're wrong. TikTok pushes videos you want to see, while US app algos push content you are most likely to engage with. These are not the same thing. In fact, content one most engages with is content that generates outrage. Try not to get angry when you open Twitter. It's not easy.
Whoever runs the platform. That's the value they see in their platforms: the ability to control what you see, when you see it, and how you see it. You might only want to see what your friends and family have been up to, and in chronological order, but they are going to make sure you have to constantly scroll past shit you couldn't care less about to get to it, especially when that shit is advertising.
Not only do they do this for marketers, they actually think that making their users regularly disappointed is a good thing. They think that forcing you to hunt for what you want makes finding it more rewarding and while you're scrolling past garbage, searching for something you just saw, and cursing the obnoxious algorithm for hiding what you actually want they call it "engagement".
I'm sure TikTok is also guilty of influencing what you see but they stay out of your way as much as possible. They bombard you with what you came for every minute you spend there. TikTok is so massively popular (and addictive) because of that. US platforms could be just as popular too, but their customers are advertisers - the people who want nothing but to take your attention away from what you want.
the blatant algorithm manipulation around elections and politics is just the icing on the cake. sure, china is probably doing this too, but they're either being more subtle or playing a longer game. meta et al may have come out ahead for a few quarters but what's that worth if user count is declining long term?
Do I wish otherwise? Of course. Will anything of the sort happen? Nope.
Fortunately we don’t have to indulge them as the project founder’s page is here: https://www.mccourt.com/project-liberty/ and the project website is here: https://www.projectliberty.io/
New tech isn’t the solution to what ails the web though. The web is built on great tech, and there’s a constant forward motion to iterate and improve on the technical stack of the web. Reigning in specific anti-consumer practices characteristic of surveillance-oriented businesses is because even if you manage to make a decentralized protocol popular for a short period of time, if there is ever enough people for it to be commercially lucrative, exactly the same cycle of centralization will repeat itself.
Never mind the shameless self-promotion, doing it while decrying self-promotion means I’m never looking at your app, full-stop.
No. Next question.