The TikTok ban seems imminent. The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law that would spell the end of TikTok as we know it in the United States, and now all parties involved are freaking out. Influencers are fleeing to rival platforms, including Xiaohongshu, a China-based app also known as RedNote. Politicians, even the ones who initially supported the ban, are trying to delay it. TikTok employees are surely wondering what they’ll do at work next week.
Others, however, are wondering if a future without TikTok could actually be a great thing for America. The complete demise of TikTok would mean one of the largest social media-slash-entertainment platforms is effectively out of the picture. That would leave billions of hours of attention free and millions of people craving new content, preferably short, viral videos that are microtargeted to each individual user and continuously update the cultural zeitgeist in weird unexpected ways.
That’s what made TikTok so popular in the first place. If some other upstart platform has a better idea, though, the United States is open for business. And one app falling and being replaced by another would be nothing new.
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This kind of innovation has driven the social media industry, like a flywheel, since its inception in the early aughts. A platform, like MySpace, becomes popular and dominates attention spans for a few years, before falling out of fashion as newer platforms, like Facebook, show up with better features. Innovation spins the wheel, but boredom, cultural shifts, and enshittification — how platforms start out serving users and end up serving their own purposes — slows it down again.
In TikTok’s case, there are obviously other forces at play: geopolitics and the fickle authority of the US government. It’s still unclear if the government will enforce the ban or whether TikTok might find a way to maintain an American operation. Nevertheless, if it comes to pass, the end of TikTok would not necessarily mean that hundreds of millions of its users would return to the warm embrace of Instagram or YouTube, both of whom have comparable short-form video products. In fact, millions of soon-to-be former TikTok users are joining platforms like RedNote in order to protest the TikTok ban as well as the power of Big Tech.
There are a lot of reasons why RedNote probably won’t become the next TikTok. Chief among them is the fact that Chinese government censors aren’t thrilled by the influx of American users and whatever politically sensitive content they might bring with them. It’s entirely possible that these “TikTok refugees” will find themselves kicked off RedNote in the coming weeks.
That means the race to become the next TikTok starts now. Sure, plenty of TikTok users will retreat to familiar, aging platforms owned by Meta and Google. The TikTok ban also stands to inject the decentralized network of servers known as the fediverse that powers platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon with millions more users in search of their new favorite social media app, whatever it might be. Mark Cuban even said ahead of the Supreme Court decision that he would fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, which is an open, decentralized network for social apps. If or how that happens remains to be seen.
“The media landscape hasn’t shifted from one medium to another,” said Rebecca Rinkevich, executive director of institutes at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center. “It’s broken into hundreds of fragmented channels unique to every individual — making the attention economy more competitive than ever. The battle for eyeballs is won with novel features and algorithmic advantages.”
But before we get too deep into how the intriguing and often confusing fediverse works, it helps to understand why so many people don’t want to go back to Instagram.
The enshittification of social media
The mechanics of the TikTok ban may be an outlier in the history of social media companies’ lifecycles, but the disappearance of a platform can lead to better platforms emerging.
Take Napster, for instance. The file-sharing app lit up college campuses in the late 1990s and early 2000s by offering access to free digital music. This upset the recording artists, who eventually sued Napster out of existence. Within a decade, though, a Swedish startup called Spotify would take over the music industry, based in part on the Napster model of peer-to-peer file sharing.
Spotify was a true revelation, offering essentially infinite music at a fairly low monthly cost, which is how it came to be worth nearly $100 billion. But now Spotify is plagued with complaints about how its platform just isn’t as user friendly as it used to be. Some call this platform decay. Others call it enshittification.
In the words of the Cory Doctorow, who coined the term, enshittification is “how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” In this 2023 essay, Doctorow goes on to argue that TikTok was well on its way to enshittification, as it “couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see” — a problem, given that TikTok’s whole reason for being was showing you what you wanted to see. (There’s a reason its pages are called “For You.”)
That’s why, even without the actions of Congress, TikTok couldn’t be the trending, avant-garde social media platform forever. It had already fallen into a cycle we saw with MySpace, then Facebook, Instagram, YouTube — basically any platform that rose to prominence on the back of its utility and popularity with users and then decayed into something less useful but more profitable. In the past couple of years, TikTok’s decay has shown itself in the form of pushy ads and an inescapable shopping feature.
“Everyone got on this platform — and Instagram and YouTube — initially because it offered something exciting and free and added value to their interactions online,” Rory Mir of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said. “Over time, it’s been diluted by advertisements, manipulative content, and just has become a bad experience for the user.”
Of course, there’s still a chance that TikTok will live to die another day in the United States. The law that the Congress passed last year requires the social media platform’s parent company ByteDance to divest or shutter its US operations by Sunday. Apple and Google, by law, will have to stop offering TikTok in their app stores after that date. Although the app will continue to work, ByteDance won’t be allowed to update it, so it will degrade over time. ByteDance, however, reportedly plans to shut down the app on the deadline, if it doesn’t get a lifeline.
But it might not have to. The Biden administration has said that it would not enforce the ban before Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday. Trump, who called for a TikTok ban back in 2020, is reportedly considering issuing an executive order to “save TikTok” soon after his inauguration, which TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will be attending. Legally, Trump probably can’t do that with an executive order alone, since Congress passed the law and Biden signed it, but he could order his Department of Justice not to enforce the ban. Apple and Google could continue to let users download the app, ByteDance could keep updating it, and nobody would get fined up to $5,000 per user that can still access the app, if that’s the case. And that’s a big “if.”
TikTok’s surprise survival, though, wouldn’t halt that cycle of decay. Already millions of TikTok users were prepared to leave before the ban took effect, flooding alternative video apps like RedNote, Lemon8, and Flip.
So not everyone is defaulting to watching Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, and it remains to be seen if they can or would return to TikTok. They may be ready for something new.
A fediverse by any other name
If the conversation around TikTok alternatives feels familiar, that’s because we had a very similar one a couple years ago, when Elon Musk bought Twitter. Many predicted that Musk would transform that platform into a right-wing echo chamber, which he did, and wanted to move their attention elsewhere.
That search for a new place to post is what introduced a lot of people to the idea of the fediverse, which is a good idea with a terrible name.
The fediverse is a blanket term for a new approach to social media, one that relies on open-source software and decentralized networks of servers. Here’s a useful definition from David Pearce at The Verge: “It’s an interconnected social platform ecosystem based on an open protocol called ActivityPub, which allows you to port your content, data, and follower graph between networks.”
In theory, your social media followers will follow you from network to network. You could also set up a single feed that would show you content from several platforms at once.
So imagine if you didn’t have to pick one TikTok alternative but instead you could see Reels, Shorts, and Snaps in one place. That’s not possible because Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat are closed ecosystems. There are signs that some legacy platforms are open to a new way of doing things, though. Meta turned heads last year, when it allowed Threads users to crosspost to fediverse platforms and follow fediverse accounts. There are also a growing number of developers building more open alternatives to major platforms using fediverse-friendly protocols.
Bluesky emerged as the most promising Twitter alternative last year in part because it offered users a familiar, friendly front end experience without getting into the details of protocols, servers, or fediverse principles. (Freedom from Musk’s politics on X probably didn’t hurt either.) Bluesky basically looks like Twitter used to look. And that success laid the groundwork for similar projects.
Just days before the Supreme Court’s TikTok decision, a startup called Pixelfed released mobile apps for its open, decentralized photo-sharing service. It’s basically Instagram but for the fediverse. There’s also one called Flashes, which is built on top of Bluesky, that came out around the same time.
The “interconnected social platform ecosystem” fun doesn’t stop with photo-sharing. The developer behind Pixelfed, Daniel Supernaul, also built a decentralized TikTok alternative called Loops. While the app hasn’t been released yet, you can see where things are going: When one major platform falls out of favor or shuts down, others rush to fill the void with a new approach, unique features, or even a completely different architecture.
It’s still hard to say which, if any, of these fediverse projects will become the next global sensation. After all, it’s notoriously difficult to create the next Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok. Not only does the app have to work, but the right group of people have to come together to make it a sensation. And then you need something special.
“Catching a good point in time to be there when networks form is important,” said Katrin Weller, a professor at GESIS Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. “Sometimes very small changes in the technology can make a big difference.”
There’s so far little evidence that any of these fediverse projects have the novelty, momentum, or innovative touch to win a billion users in the next few years. Bluesky, for all its success, still has fewer than 30 million users, compared to 275 million Threads users. TikTok, by the way, says it has 170 million US users.
Then again, who knows what tech will come up with next. TikTok started out as a lip-synching app for teens, only to evolve into an engine for internet culture and influence in the span of a few years. Facebook started out as a campus directory for college students and then evolved into a cesspool of misinformation that also sells VR headsets.
Or maybe Elon Musk will buy TikTok, too, and fold it into X. That could really send people fleeing to the fediverse.
