TikTok says it is officially going dark in the United States now that a federal ban of the app is going into effect. Around 6 PM Pacific time, the app began notifying people in the US, including Verge staffers, with a message that says the ban will “make our services temporarily unavailable.”
Wish people quit posting this shit, who cares. We are on the fediverse
Well for one, it’s easily one of the largest social media platforms on the planet right now, so it getting cut off from a major percentage of its user base overnight is a pretty big deal in terms of discussions on government censorship.
But if you want a more Fediverse-pertinent reason to care, those several million users are going to be going somewhere for their content fix. Some of them are going to be trying out Loops and Pixelfed, which are Fediverse platforms that replace some features of TikTok. While it’ll likely only be a small percentage of those users who try migrating over, that’s still going to have an affect on adjacent ActivityPub platforms as a bunch of new instances and users start engaging with it.
Valid conclusion, thanks.
That said, the post comes off as more OMGtiktik! Posting rather than “how to grow the fediverse in a post tiktok world”
My frustration comes from the firehouse of inconclusive, unproductive rubbernecking on the wriggling of corporate social media, which is all a program for data extraction, regardless of the extractor.