I like the idea of a federated version of that, but there are many problems:

1. When people scroll, they need an algorithm to choose content for them.
2. 99% of average TikTok content is low quality shit and it’s the algorithm to find and promote what works
3. All that 99% of shit is occupying exabytes on bytedance servers. Users are uploading terabytes of shit every hour, it’s impossibile for a federated instance to keep all this shit on disk. Look how Lemmy is designed for example. I upload an image and then it’s stored forever in hundreds of instances. For videos is untenable. Only companies that are profiting from this (for example using such videos for training ai models, or using this videos to hook people and serve them highly personalized ads) can host a TikTok clone