On Friday, the Supreme Courtroom heard arguments within the case that may decide the destiny of TikTok in the US. Whereas some customers and creators are holding out hope that the ban is not going to go into impact and that they’ll be capable of proceed utilizing the app, justices appear poised to uphold the legislation that might slowly render it defunct.
Because the courtroom’s choice looms, among the platform’s roughly 170 million customers in the US are beginning to surprise: The place is everybody going as a substitute?
There have been some murmurs about Lemon8, a extremely visible social media app centered largely on way of life content material that has the identical Chinese language proprietor as TikTok, ByteDance. Resembling a hybrid between Instagram and Pinterest, Lemon8 first launched in Japan in 2020 and has slowly rolled out in different international locations.
In 2023, as lawmakers in Washington had been grilling TikTok’s chief government, ByteDance was quietly pushing creators to hitch Lemon8 and providing potential paid incentives. However due to its possession, the platform could possibly be topic to the identical legislation as TikTok.
In current days, there has additionally been a surge of curiosity in RedNote, a Chinese language social media app that’s also called Xiaohongshu. The platform has been billed by some as a knockoff of TikTok, whereas additionally drawing comparisons to Pinterest and Instagram.
If Lemon8 and RedNote had been to be banned as properly, TikTok customers would largely be restricted to long-established social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube, which have added options lately to compete with TikTok.
Instagram, as an illustration, rolled out its vertical video function, Reels, in 2020 as a solution to the ByteDance-owned platform. Initially, some customers discovered that Reels left rather a lot to be desired, however its vertical video format is visually just like TikTok, and a few customers already cross-post TikTok content material there.
YouTube launched YouTube Shorts the identical 12 months, permitting for short-form movies of as much as one minute.
And, in fact, there’s the standard YouTube video format. In recent times, TikTok has been placing an emphasis on longer movies, which implies creators and customers alike could also be primed to start making and watching video content material that appears at house on YouTube, quite than YouTube Shorts.
Yumna Jawad, a recipe developer and content material creator who goes by Really feel Good Foodie, mentioned she felt ready for the potential ban as a result of she had taken pains to verify she by no means relied too closely on a single platform in her work.
“I used to be on Flipboard. I’m attempting to determine Lemon8 and Threads,” mentioned Ms. Jawad, who’s 42 and lives in Grand Rapids, Mich. “There’s consistently a brand new one, and I’m all the time open to attempting issues out.”
