Best app yet, but eventually that app is gonna get bought out just like TikTok and eventually it will get censored.
I never use Tick Tock but when I saw this headline I decided to sign up for this. All I saw was a bunch of it Arabic writing and Arabic posts. It might be popular but it’s not popular in North America. Deleted immediately.
Why would anyone use TikTok or any clone like that to begin with? Do they want their brain to rot?
Anything to get that dopamine drip from the Black Rectangle
You say on another dopamine drop website
Oh i know
I’m more blaming the system than the user. The system is designed to be as addicting as possible. Literally a century of addiction research into drugs and gambling, all used to squeeze every drop of engagement from the user
To a point. At least we’re reading and using our brains more on these text-based sites!
See, White Rectangle, you swipe like this: “oh. oh quite. oh dear. oh no. aw. and how.”
But with Black Rectangle, you swipe like: “yo, hol’ da commentz, Imma bounce your pinky up in this!”this comment was brought to you by the nineties.
Back before the alogorithm became what it is today, it was pretty good, I actually saw stuff I was interested in from small creators
Reels only shows ppl with hella followers and views;, but algorithm is a lot better at showing me my interests (on the feed, if you scroll on any reel it shows irrelevant stuff)
From Wikipedia: “
UpScrolled was launched in June 2025 by Recursive Methods Pty Ltd.[2][3] It was founded by Issam Hijazi, a Palestinian-Australian app developer who previously worked for IBM and Oracle.[3][4] UpScrolled is backed by the Tech for Palestine incubator.
So much for being impartial.
This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not being impartial.
If a side’s position is the truth, they’re going to support impartiality, because they want the truth to be spread, which supports their side.
TikTok is probably about to start moderating heavily in favour of a pro-Israel/anti-Palestine bias, just like other Western social media platforms. It’s possible that all a startup would have to do is not do this to secure funding from Palestinian investors.
My only question is whether they’ll allow progressive types on their platform long-term.
From what I saw they are impartial but have an enormous moderation problem. Most likely due to being overwhelmed by the influx of new users.
I feel like every platform outside of the Fediverse is like this nowadays.
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.
I can’t imagine. I can get all of that elsewhere, video is such a slow delivery…
There is something just wrong with quick cuts and fast in your face stuff. I swear it’s a simple dumbing down plus dopamine injection. It can’t be good for you.
It’s not! It’s terrible for you! I miss the early days of TikTok when everyone just shit on it for being cringy dances.
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).
If you look into the founder, you’ll quickly realize that he’s very much biased and has a lot of agendas to push, and I have no doubt in mind that this is reflected in his platform.
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.
I mean at this point in time the Jews are the Nazis. However I agree that that shit shouldn’t be allowed on any of the social media platforms.
No, idiot. Not “the Jews.” Stop doing the zionists job for them.
No the fuck they’re not. Fuck out of here with that antisemitic bullshit
Fine, Zionist. Not Jews, but any news that support Israel are guilty of genocide as well. Fuck you.
Isn’t this almost exactly what Elon said?
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.
The fuck is UpScrolled? I thought the consensus was to use RedNote?
There was a chart posted here yesterday where they’re saying loop.Video I don’t think there’s any agreement on anything.
‘s’
^ You dropped this.
Wut. Look at the posts, it’s right there.
I have high hopes for the fediverse, I just hope we’re able to solve the abuse problem before mass adoption. That Fediverse Chick nonsense was too much.
I remember awhile back that the RedNote community rejected the Western newcomers because they were obnoxious. Oh, and the Chinese user base is not very fond of LGBT people or culture.
I’m still on Rednote, I mostly see content from users in the USA, UK, Australia, Guandong and Bejing. They are all so nice, they’re just like us. Even the mean comments are funny. Also plenty of lesbians there lmfao.
Of course China has their own extreme nationals, but those comments get deleted just as the MAGA ones do.
MAGAs burn up there like vampires splashed with Holy Water, so it’s currently my favorite short form video platform.
Idk what about the people who stayed. I just remember how the original wave from TikTok was rejected, and how there were a lot oblivious western TikTok users who were shocked that the Chinese user base on Rednote didn’t embrace them with open arms when they invaded.
Yeah I was there for the first wave. I have no evidence for my next claim, but the bad people really just felt like bored 4channers.
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:
Edit 2: Looking at the account’s follower list, it looks like users are largely using the Palestinian genocide to justify Nazi imagery. Equating Israel’s actions with Jews in general. There are a few straight up Hitler glorification accounts on the follower list, which have “the Jews are genociding Palestine” types of posts right alongside 1488 posts, swastikas, and Nazi salutes. Here is a quick screenshot of some of the followers:
And here is a screenshot of how those followers are using the Palestinian genocide to justify the holocaust:
The upper post is a bunch of dead Palestinian kids and babies lined up in a row. The lower post is obvious. Both (re)posted by the same @HitlerTheHero account.the “no censorship” part is already being weaponized by Nazis.
Yeah, this is the inevitable result with any app that tries the no censorship schtick. It happens every single time, obviously this time won’t be any different.
Jesus fucking Christ.
The Palestinian made app is unironically a hub for nazis and islamists
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.
An app made by a Palestinian guy who’s very much politically active participating in a no censorship gimmick? This was always the inevitable end result.
No, it wasn’t. It just needs content moderation. There’s zero reason for a Palestinian guy to platform white supremacists.
The lack of moderation from what I can see is on purpose
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.
Device permissions? That’s not the issue. I think people just lack software knowledge and should learn the difference between proprietary software and Libre software.
If people understood how to check the software license and determine if it’s a free software license, that would cover almost everything they need to do to help us stop having this problem with picking the wrong software.
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!!!
You know that you could be against both, right?
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
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.
Nice!
Ah okay, that was my understanding as well. I was curious if anyone had tried making an ad.
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.
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.
Brave regularly gets me flagged as a bot on Android
Mobile data is logged though, but yea anonymous from the platform, sure
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.
There is but it’s not on any app store yet, not even f-droid
Whats it called?
loops.video I think
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.
Honestly the best way I’ve seen this handled is how Odysee did it. There’s crypto involved, but ignoring that, they essentially just asked users to choose to allocate an amount of their hard drive/bandwith to be used for storing, and sharing videos.
That would work better from an end user perspective, rather than running their data usage up, and using storage on a storage-limited device like a phone, and I’m sure there’s a way to incentivize it that isn’t crypto
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.
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
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.
