Stephen Downes

The phrase "won't be another Twitter" doesn't refer to the content, which may well sink to the same levels under new ownership. It refers to the pattern of people leaving. "TikTok's structure differs from X in two meaningful ways," writes Laurens Hof. "The first is that its TikTok's architecture makes the network much more invisible to its own users... The second... is that where Twitter and X are the centers of political discourse, TikTok is the center of culture." Also (and in my view more importantly) "Video is in an entirely different category, with storage costs, bandwidth costs, transcoding costs, CDN costs that are both much larger than text." Still, "Skylight, the ATProto-based TikTok alternative, crossed 380,000 users this week with around 95,000 monthly active users." And there's also Loops, the ActivityPub video platform.