12mo ago

If you woke up tomorrow, and everyone from tiktok started using Lemmy, what would your first thought be?

How would you feel about it?

Let's pretend lemmy just got a sick ass video hosting feature for this example.

52 comments

I have no interest in short form video no matter how sick-ass. So I'd ignore it, and if that weren't possible I'd leave.
- Same, I just don't want to watch videos of random people talking to their phone camera. It's such a narcissistic "look at me" way to use social media that I can't relate to it at all.
- Videos are obnoxious

My first thought would be "why can't I load Lemmy" as they DDOSed the site
Shy of that, "good for them." Glad they wouldn't choose anything worse 😉

I’d probably jump ship. The dynamic that exists on TikTok is not something I have any interest in participating in. And that’s entirely putting aside the massive user privacy issues.

I'd probably have to filter out the sudden influx of TikTok-like shorts, but I'd still be glad to have more people to connect with, and on a FOSS platform no less.

I'll give it a week and they'll be gone. Lemmy is not built for short-form content and very short attention spans, so the format won't work for them.

There's no hard limit on the number of people you can block in Lemmy (unlike the alien site which assumes only 1,000 assholes exist in the world). If the TikTok-ers mostly come from one instance, defederation would be swift. Barring that, I would just engineer a solution since my instance runs a lot of custom frontned/backend components already.
TL;DR: I'd notice it long enough to get annoyed, but it would be an easily solvable problem.

Everyone seems scared but I would be happy that such a FOSS designed project would finally be used in mass scale.
Sure content would not be the same, but the structure of lemmy would probably encourage more discussion and problem solving rather than hate induced comments or crazy mob-like behaviour.
When I talk about structure, I talk about some feature like having a downvote, not so much advertisement, the fediverse, no(or just not so much) incentive to make money from the platform, text based posts, custom front ends, etc...
- Video hosting man ...

I'd just hope they all join a tiktok-specific instance so it's easy enough to filter out. But it would be nice to see a larger adoption of the fediverse (although I feel like overnight growth of that scale might rock the boat too much, it would be far more preferable to have a more gradual adoption).

"Why is this not loading?" as inevitably nothing will load when the servers get 1000x the traffic they were expecting.
But assuming the servers would somehow handle it, it would be a huge boon to Lemmy. There are a lot of people here saying they would leave, but I think that's stupid. The reason why I left Reddit was that the platform gave me the middle finger, it had nothing to do with the users. The same goes for TikTok, but this time the middle finger comes with a thousand prying eyes. On Lemmy, I could finally find communities in the niche hobbies that I like.

My thirst thought would be "poor admins. They need to stock up on storage when all this videos are gonna be federated".

Huh, Lemmy got video now? Interesting. Well, block that user, subscribe to this new video based community, also block this user within the community. Oh hey, this person I recognize from YouTube Shorts is here, too.
I think there would be a lot of sorting to do

I would find some other platform. Maybe back to forums, but I would miss a nice app for them.

I would look at the clock radio and see if it's playing "I got you babe" by Sonny and Cher.

If I was qualified and competent enough to be around the general population, I would be on Facebook.

I have some immediate suspicions, but that's the easy way out. I'd have to see. After all Tiktok has worthwhile content, I'm told.

That depends on how they were posting.
If suddenly every post was a vertical video with every title and comment in Gen Z slang and therefore unreadable to me I'd wonder what the fuck happened. Otherwise I probably wouldn't notice unless people were actively talking about it.

It's fine. You see what you want and filter what you want.
Also, who says we aren't already here?

Well this will make things a lot easier for the CCP
- Well, the CCP doesn't own the TikTok userbase.
  I guess maybe you could say "there'd be a lot of users from China", but my vague understanding -- I don't use TikTok -- is that TikTok isn't available in China. For domestic use, there's a different platform, Douyin, from the same company. TikTok is only aimed at the international market.
  https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24/tech/tiktok-douyin-bytedance-china-intl-hnk/index.html
  Based on the statistics in this video, the largest bloc of TikTok users are in the US, followed by Indonesia and Brazil.