Obviously Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. are federated decentralized equivalent to their centralized counterparts, but what is the counterpart in the fediverse to TikTok? It is a dominant app for millions of people, and as far as I can tell the closest thing is Peertube, but isn’t that more of a YouTube equivalent? Does it not exist because the bandwidth and storage costs are just too great? Or because the algorithmic nature of content selection is inherently anti-fediverse in some way? Clearly many people choose to interact with each other this way, but it seems like a gap in the fediverse and I was wondering why.
I think you misread the previous commenter. I think their point was: the assertion that nobody will leave TikTok despite its abuses is very similar to the assertion that nobody will leave Twitter for Mastodon, or Reddit for Lemmy, etc despite their abuses.
Yet, it is happening. Whether it will be a large or lasting migration to open, less intrusive platforms remains to be seen, but the fact that we are talking about it here, and not on reddit, would imply that it’s at least possible. The challenges and possibilities are similar.
But, I generally share the concern that the high cost of video storage and distribution is a major barrier to success.