Big Updates Are Coming to Loops
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Loops, the open source Tiktok alternative for the Fediverse, is continuing to grow and evolve. Although the platform launched with a fairly limited featureset, development has ramped up to pull in some ambitious new features. Daniel Supernault has this to say:
With Loops, we saw an opportunity to bring short video to the fediverse in a way that feels familiar, fun, and safe — while building something new beyond Pixelfed: a community-first platform of its own.
Daniel Supernault, Pixelfed Development lead
There’s a lot of new features coming in to the video-sharing platform. Let’s break down some of the most significant ones:
Loops Comes to the Web
One of the most important updates of this development cycle concerns a new Web interface for the Loops platform. Soon, users will no longer be constrained to Android or iOS clients to make use of Loops and its social features.
Demo courtesy of Daniel Supernault The new UI looks incredibly slick, and feels like an evolution of Pixelfed’s own design language. Bringing a Web interface to Loops feels like a smart idea, as it opens up the possibility for more people to use it.
The new Web UI also ships with a Dark Mode, for those of you hoping to shield your eyes from a bright browser page. It’s clean, and really makes the video content pop.
Better User Controls
A big design focus for Loops (and presumably, Pixelfed) centers around giving users greater control over their online experience. This includes what they see on the timeline, who can interact with them, and whether posts can be interacted with in the first place. Taking further lessons from Pixelfed, Loops also brings in comprehensive tools for blocking bad actors, and keeping your timeline civil.
A new user-wellness feature here is called Screen Time, which helps keep track of how often a person is logged into Loops and watching videos. While it’s something of a niche feature, it’s nice to know that there are ways to set daily time limits.
Self-Hosting
The backend code for Loops has been open to the wider community for a while, but the prospect of including a Web-facing interface solidifies the possibility that Loops will soon formally allow admins to host their own Loops instances. This boils down to a few critically important features for the network: admin controls, customization, and federation support.
dansup (@dansup@mastodon.social)
Loops will be ready to self host very soon, these are the server requirements: PHP 8.3+ Mysql 8+ Redis FFmpeg 4.5+ imagemagick/libvips node + npm And yes, a dockerfile will be shipped in the first release ✨ #loops
Mastodon (mastodon.social)
Admin Controls and Customization
A big focus of Loops development has involved encouraging admins to set up their own community instances. Loops takes a lot of the lessons learned from Pixelfed, and incorporates a lot of flexibility for admins to make their instances stand out, while providing necessary tools to keep communities safe.
Custom Links and Pages in Loops Admins will be happy to see the addition of custom pages and navigation for instances. With the upcoming release, it will be even easier for admins to put need-to-know instance info front and center to their community. This could include sharing community messaging channels, donation links, methods for getting updates from the admin, or details pertaining to server status.
Federation Support
It might not seem obvious, but Loops technically already supports ActivityPub federation. It’s just that the flagship instance at loops.video only has the feature enabled for select accounts, for testing purposes. Nevertheless, federated following and interactions are possible, and seem to work.
Dan’s account on Loops.Video does in fact federate. Here it is, as seen from Mastodon. The significance of Loops turning on federation capabilities cannot be understated. Short-form video is an extremely popular medium, and bringing it in to the Fediverse gives people a new way to talk to one another, and might just be the incentive needed to get more video creators on the network.
Loops Studio
One of the more exciting features coming in an update is Loops Studio, a creator’s dashboard designed for uploading and managing videos, viewing interactions, and keeping track of analytics and engagement. This could provide a solid incentive for content creators to commit to using Loops full-time, and allow them to better engage with their friends and followers across the network.
Interestingly, the new composer for creating loops includes some unique capabilities that seem to be directly inspired from Tiktok: there are options to allow other users to stitch your video into theirs, allow users to perform a duet with you, and also disclose Not Safe for Work content. There’s even a way to tag whether something was created using generative AI.
Loops Sound Library
Details on this feature are scarce, but this NLNet-funded project is designed to allow Loops videos to incorporate music from Fediverse musicians that allow for remixing and resharing. The feature reportedly will allow users to select tracks from Funkwhale and possibly other federated music platforms for background music in their videos, while preserving attribution.
The idea of integrating with Funkwhale and other federated music servers is older than it sounds. Over the years, Dansup has experimented with various mockups and ideas on how to incorporate music capabilities into Pixelfed. It seems like some of that work may have eventually influenced this feature.
Comprehensive Data Export
Being an open and federated platform, Loops is aiming to include an export data for all of your videos, posts, and social connections. The goal here is to give users the ability to migrate to other Loops servers and retain their follower graph, much in the same way that Mastodon does. Hopefully, in the future, this might also give users the ability to pull in videos and activities from their old instances when moving.
In Conclusion
Loops is a massive, ambitious undertaking, and it’s exciting to see so much development effort finally bear fruit. While we still have to wait a little while longer for a release to ship and for the flagship instance to get updated, I’m extremely hopeful about the prospects of having a free and open Tiktok / Vine alternative for the Fediverse.
