Loops: One Year Later
CEME 1202 | Sat 08 Aug 10:45 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
Presented by
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Daniel Supernault
@dansup@mastodon.social
https://dansup.com
Daniel Supernault is the creator of Pixelfed, the open-source federated photo-sharing platform, and Loops, a decentralized short-form video app built for the fediverse. A longtime advocate for privacy-respecting, community-owned social media, he has been building on ActivityPub since 2018, crafting ad-free, algorithm-free alternatives to Big Tech platforms. Based in Canada, he continues to push for a web where people — not corporations — own their online communities.
Daniel Supernault
@dansup@mastodon.social
https://dansup.com
Daniel Supernault is the creator of Pixelfed, the open-source federated photo-sharing platform, and Loops, a decentralized short-form video app built for the fediverse. A longtime advocate for privacy-respecting, community-owned social media, he has been building on ActivityPub since 2018, crafting ad-free, algorithm-free alternatives to Big Tech platforms. Based in Canada, he continues to push for a web where people — not corporations — own their online communities.
Abstract
Last year at FediCon I gave a keynote on Pixelfed and previewed Loops, a federated answer to short-form video. Twelve months later, Loops is a working platform: a Laravel backend speaking ActivityPub, a Vue 3 frontend, and native React Native apps on iOS and Android. This talk is a candid look at the year between the preview and the platform.
I’ll walk through what shipped: the For You feed without surveillance, federation with the wider fediverse, creator tools, Starter Kits, and Playlists. I’ll also cover what it actually took to build all of this across three stacks as a single, community-funded developer, including the hard problems unique to federating video, the trade-offs I made, and where Loops goes from here.
If you care about what ethical short-form video looks like, or about shipping ambitious open-source software without VC backing, this talk is for you.
Last year at FediCon I gave a keynote on Pixelfed and previewed Loops, a federated answer to short-form video. Twelve months later, Loops is a working platform: a Laravel backend speaking ActivityPub, a Vue 3 frontend, and native React Native apps on iOS and Android. This talk is a candid look at the year between the preview and the platform.
I’ll walk through what shipped: the For You feed without surveillance, federation with the wider fediverse, creator tools, Starter Kits, and Playlists. I’ll also cover what it actually took to build all of this across three stacks as a single, community-funded developer, including the hard problems unique to federating video, the trade-offs I made, and where Loops goes from here.
If you care about what ethical short-form video looks like, or about shipping ambitious open-source software without VC backing, this talk is for you.