I was fine with memes over the past few years ... sure they are a quick dopamine hit that make you laugh or think

But now when my friends send me tiktok videos ... especially when someone has been watching these video streams for hours or days ... they start sending out the most random, inane, mindless content ... it's the kind of material that keep a monkey occupied.

Oh shit!

This post actually made me look for a solution and I found one!
Solution to opening tiktoks without using tiktok app or site, not how to stop ur friends sending u garbage.

It made me think... mpv player can play basically any link you throw at it (thanks to yt-dlp), and we also have mpv on Android, so why can't we do it there as well. And sure enough, I found this https://github.com/mpv-android/mpv-android/pull/58, someone baked yt-dlp in mpv for Android, making it possible to open link in mpv (share >> play in mpv)

It works for instagram and all other shit.

I felt this way with instagram. My phone can barely handle the web app and you can't even replay the video without an account. Truly garbage UX

I just shared this with my wife, since she has started sharing TikTok lately.

PSA: If it's links on Discord, you can prefix the link with vx to make it natively embed so you don't have to click through (e.g. vxtiktok.com). This also works with twitter links (vxtwitter.com). People out there hosting these domains doing the lord's work

This but it's instagram

I fucking abhor TikTok. Anybody who installs that app is a danger to themselves and a traitor to mankind. Disgusting fucking thing, it pisses me off.

The thing about it that irks me the most is that it's not even for any valuable means. It's just a slightly different FaceBook or YouTube Shorts platform! You're selling us all out for fucking video clips?!

I just ignore them because the videos are a mess of graphics and popups outside the app. It has literally made some videos unwatchable for me as they kept getting interrupted and breaking.

I just don't respond but she's not getting the hint.

As always I like promoting open source frontends for these pages. For tiktok I use proxytok. For changing any tiktok link to one of these instances use the libredirect extension for firefox, it also works in mobile

Have you heard about our lords and saviors the alternative frontends?

Do memes stop being memes when they're on tiktok?

Suddenly glad all of my friends are old people like me.

i shall retaliate with fediverse links

This is why I wrote a Telegram bot that uses yt-dlp to convert videos and send them directly to people. My friend group all use different socials, Facebook, tiktok, Twitter, Lemmy, etc., and the bot will take the link, download the video, then send it back to the person, and then they can forward it to whatever chats they want.

It's been pretty fucking handy. That is, if your friends use Telegram.

Why don't they just actually send the video file?

Ugh… I can feel this in my bones.

I'll usually tell him that the sound isn't working when I open it in the browser and I'm not downloading the app. But he keeps... on... trying...

Copy link, paste into browser incognito