CCP: let's create 200 apps where each app has just less than 1 million active; and then cross-content across the apps so you are sort of browsing a single site. Maybe China will finally bring federated social media.

It runs and operates outside US. How exactly would you enforce the ban? Seize the domain?

Looks like you have never used TikTok or RedNote.

Chinese users are starting to caption their videos in English. American users are posting regularly.

It is the number 1 app in my country right now, because of the TikTok ban.

Look up the playstore and you will see. Download it for yourself and you will see.

Rednote has been shown as the top free app (per Apple’s own App Store in my device at least) for going on a week, so the magnitude may be larger than you imply.

Also, having tried it myself, the algorithm works much like TikTok whereby it learns to show English speakers English content pretty quickly.

Also the general consensus among people who have used IG and TikTok (I personally don’t use IG) seems to be that the former does not at all substitute for the latter, particularly in terms of the subjective “authentic” feel of the content (IG often said to be lacking the community feel of TikTok).

A non-trivial number of videos I've seen this week mention also being able to find the creator of said video on Rednote. It is also the number 1 downloaded app in the US iOS store this week. The news may be a logical extreme, but it's not fake.

Yeah, it's the same with the "millions" of users moving to bluesky or reddit moving to lemmy. A bunch of people go there and eventually come back.

Probably. I didn't know that about it when I used that word, but a sibling comment also confirms this, so thanks for the correction.

I agree. I'm not sure if I think all of this is good or not. Even if you, a gov't, didn't have an interest in managing your citizens vis-a-vis some platform, it doesn't mean other govt's don't have that interest, so maybe there's some validity to it in that case. But all of that raises even more questions, like "so what?" and "to what end?"

A lot of my friends have stopped using twitter and have started using Bluesky.

> the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true)

That is the Chinese name of the app (although I've heard mixed reports on if "little red book" as a term for the book actually common in China). The founder claims it's because of the founder's "career at Bain & Company and education at the Stanford Graduate School of Business" which both use red, but I'm pretty sure it's a pun on his name also being Mao.