Loops

What does TikTok look like once you remove the business model? Strip out the ad auction, the data brokerage, the behavioral profiling and the growth team chasing session length, and you’re left with three things: a camera, a feed and a comment section. Loops is Daniel Supernault’s bet that those three things are enough.

Supernault has done this before. Pixelfed, the decentralized Instagram alternative they built, has spent years as one of the fediverse’s most credible arguments that federated social media can handle more than text. Loops applies the same thesis to vertical video. It’s a free, open-source short-video network built on ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, Pixelfed and a growing list of compatible services. That last point is the strategic center of the whole project. A Mastodon user can follow a Loops creator, boost their videos and reply to them without installing Loops at all.

The positioning is clear and unusually honest. Loops is not trying to beat TikTok on content volume, creator payouts or algorithmic stickiness, and it couldn’t if it tried. It competes on trust: no ads, no sale of user data, no AI training on your uploads, and no ownership claim over your work. It’s funded by donations and grants rather than venture capital, which removes the usual pressure to monetize attention. That is the project’s moral backbone and also its biggest strategic risk.

Early reception is warm. The app holds 4.5 out of 5 from 30 ratings on the US iOS App Store. Thirty ratings is an enthusiast sample, not a mass-market verdict, so read it as early adopters who like the mission enough to forgive the rough edges. Loops is a serious piece of software with a coherent philosophy. It’s also early, it’s thinly populated, and in places it’s visibly unfinished.

• Federation via ActivityPub: Loops videos travel across the fediverse. People on Mastodon, Pixelfed and other compatible servers can follow, share and interact with Loops creators from their own accounts.
• Two Distinct Feeds: A chronological Following feed for people you’ve chosen, and a For You feed that recommends creators from Loops and other federated servers without manipulative engagement tactics.
• Creator-Focused Camera: Built-in vertical video recording with lens switching and captions. It’s simple on purpose.
• 60-Second Ceiling: Videos are capped at one minute, which keeps the format short.
• Threaded Comments: Replies stay attached to each video, with mentions and likeable replies.
• Discovery Tools: Hashtag pages, search, and likes, shares and boosts that push videos to new viewers.
• Granular Notifications: You choose which alerts you get.
• A Rights Policy in Plain English: No ads, no data sales, no AI training, no ownership claims over uploads.

The Feed, Rebuilt on Different Terms

TikTok’s For You page is both a brilliant piece of engineering and a slot machine. It learns from every pause and rewatch, and it’s tuned for one metric: keep the thumb moving. Loops keeps the format but changes the incentive. Its For You feed is designed to recommend creators from Loops and the wider fediverse using signals users control, mainly follows and engagement, rather than an opaque model optimizing for time-on-app.

That’s the right philosophy, but it runs into a hard limit: a recommendation engine is only as good as its catalog. With a small user base, even an honest algorithm has less to choose from. TikTok can show you something you didn’t know you wanted because it has an enormous catalog to pick from. Loops can only surface what exists, and right now that’s a lot less. Expect repetition and niche clustering, and accept that the feed can run dry of interesting material quickly.

The chronological Following feed is the stronger of the two. Feeds sorted by “what we think you’ll engage with” have trained users to accept missing posts from people they actually follow. Loops returns to a simple rule: you follow someone, you see their posts, in order. It’s dull in the best way.

Federation as a Growth Strategy

Federation is easy to dismiss as an ideological feature for protocol enthusiasts. In Loops’ case it’s also the closest thing the app has to a growth plan.

Every new video platform faces the cold-start problem: creators won’t post where there’s no audience, and viewers won’t come where there are no creators. Vine had Twitter’s distribution. Reels had Instagram’s install base. Loops has neither, but it has ActivityPub. A creator who posts on Loops can reach an existing fediverse audience on Mastodon and Pixelfed immediately. A boost from a well-followed Mastodon account can send a Loops video into far-flung timelines that never touched the app. It’s a real distribution advantage, and it’s one that a closed startup can’t buy.

The downside is onboarding friction. Federated systems ask more of new users than “sign in with Apple,” and friction at registration matters more here than it would elsewhere, because Loops has fewer chances to win someone back. Every failed sign-up is a user who goes back to TikTok and doesn’t return.

Creation: Modest by Design

The built-in camera covers the essentials: vertical recording, lens switching and captions. Don’t expect the effects libraries, AR filters, green screens and template-driven trends that turned TikTok into a pocket production studio. Loops’ camera is a tool for people who want to point a phone at something interesting and post it.

That restraint is defensible. Effects-heavy creation tools tend to standardize content into the same few trending formats, and a platform aiming for the feel of “early TikTok,” a comparison several reviewers make, benefits from rawer material. Built-in captions are an accessibility feature that should be standard everywhere.

The 60-second cap is a deliberate choice. Mainstream platforms have pushed steadily toward longer videos to compete with YouTube for watch time. Loops keeps it to one minute, which forces editing discipline and keeps the feed fast. Educators, explainers and storytellers will find it limiting. For everyone else, it keeps the app’s identity clear.

Conversation That Stays Put

Threaded comments attached to each video sound like a minor feature, but they solve a real problem. TikTok’s comment sections are a flat pile of reactions where actual conversation goes to die. Loops threads its replies, supports mentions and lets you like individual replies, which gives discussions some structure.

This matters more in a federated system. When replies can come from users on different servers who may never have opened Loops, keeping the conversation tied to the video it’s about prevents the fragmentation that plagues cross-server discussion elsewhere in the fediverse.

The Ethics Ledger

Loops’ commitments are specific: no ads, no data sales, no AI training on your content, no ownership claims over your uploads. The AI training pledge carries particular weight. Creators have watched platform after platform quietly update terms of service to feed uploads into model training. Loops rules it out explicitly.

The skepticism here is about sustainability, not sincerity. Video is expensive. Storage and bandwidth for short-form video cost far more than text posts or even photos, and a donation-and-grant model has to cover those bills indefinitely. Supernault’s long run with Pixelfed is reassuring, and the open-source license means the code outlives any single funding crisis. Still, anyone moving their creative output to Loops should understand the economic foundation is thinner than a venture-backed competitor’s. It’s also more honest.

Loops sensibly doesn’t reinvent the visual grammar of short video. The vertical, full-screen, swipe-to-advance format is now as standard as the scroll bar, and departing from it would only add friction. The design is functional rather than distinctive. Users moving from TikTok or Reels will find their way immediately, but nothing about the interface has its own identity. Customization options are limited, which fits the app’s minimalism but will frustrate anyone who likes to adjust their tools.

Performance is where the app’s age shows — or rather, where it will show if the small team doesn’t stay on top of it. A short-video app lives or dies on one promise: the next video should already be there when the thumb swipes. Feed loading that stalls under real-world network conditions is the worst failure state a format built on instant gratification can have, and it’s the single thing this app can least afford. Layout is the other early-stage risk: screens with unusual safe areas, as on older iPhones, are a classic place for interface elements to end up blocked or misplaced. None of these are structural problems, and all are the kind of issues a small team fixes over time. Right now, they’re the risks to watch.

Loops is a native app on both iOS and Android, and on both it’s an entirely touch-driven experience built around the vertical swipe. That’s the right choice. Short-form video is a phone-native medium, and the camera features, including lens switching and vertical capture, are designed around how people actually hold their devices.

On iOS, public feedback is the most detailed. The 4.5-star rating shows strong goodwill, but layout on older iPhones is exactly the kind of detail a privacy-focused audience will notice — a platform positioning itself against surveillance capitalism will naturally attract users who keep phones longer, so polish on legacy hardware matters more than usual.

On Android, there’s less public review data to draw on, so it’s harder to say how mature that build is. The open-source, decentralized approach fits naturally with Android’s more tinker-friendly users, and the feature set is the same across both platforms. Expect the same early-stage caveats on either OS until the review base grows.

Loops gets the hard questions right. It has a defensible answer on ethics, a clever answer to distribution through federation, and a respectful answer on feed design. The difficult part of building a principled TikTok alternative isn’t writing the policy; it’s sticking to it when growth stalls. Supernault’s funding model and Pixelfed track record suggest Loops will stick to it.

What Loops doesn’t have yet is the easy part done well: feeds that load reliably, a frictionless sign-up, layouts that work on every supported phone, and enough content to make the For You page worth opening. Those are solvable problems, and the fact that Loops’ weaknesses are mostly technical rather than philosophical is good news.

Install it if the mission matters to you, follow a few creators, and check back in six months. Loops isn’t a TikTok replacement today. It is a credible argument that one could exist.