#this year I’ve expanded my socials to bluesky and instagram

[gomzdrawfr]

Bam bing bong, summary of my doodles in 2024

[titles-for-tangents]

This is just a thought and an observation about my dash in particular today, but for all the lovely posts about warm welcomes and camaraderie Tik Tok refugees are finding over on Rednote, I’ve not really seen a single post yet on archiving Tik Tok videos for posterity, lest we lose almost everything a la Vine.

Plenty of other social media sites now accommodate Tik Tok-length videos of course, like YouTube’s Shorts for example, but not everyone has or wants a YouTube account. The closest I’ve seen so far to the concept of backing up Tik Tok videos onto another site is that Mark Zuckerberg is about to have a rather rude awakening when he discovers that no, not everyone wants to keep uploading their content to the shitty social media company that is so bad at managing data and misinformation they are literally responsible for political coups in India. What a concept, Mark; maybe not everyone wants to flock to or right back to Instagram’s Reels.

Yes, the fact that mass exoduses can and will happen is having CEOs pants-shittingly scared out of their wits, because at the heart of it the idea of social media and the internet in general being a thing to profit off of instead of the internet being a public utility has always been a flawed goose chase from the start, but that’s kind of a red herring here.

What will likely happen is that plenty of TikTokkers (is that a word?) will make copies of their videos and upload them to Red Book in much the same way plenty of artists re-uploaded their art to BlueSky once they migrated from Twitter. Plenty may find it economical to move to a third site as well, like YouTube, if only to expand their audience. Not everything is going to be saved from deletion and/or becoming inaccessible, so I do expect many of my reblogged posts of Tik Toks to become defunct as many of my reblogged posts from Vine have unless they’re sourced from a different site like YouTube. Tumblr is likely to eventually accommodate Red Book posts though, so hopefully we’ll see some excellent Tik Toks archived over there soon.

My point is that while it’s great to face the U.S. government’s ban of Tik Tok with mirth and spite rather than fear, I’m not really seeing any urgency from anyone on tumblr yet reminding folks to back up their Tik Tok videos. Some of that is the nature of tumblr being a different social media site entirely, yes, but if this ban can happen as soon as Sunday, now is the time for TikTokkers to back up as much data as possible. There may be a short window of time after next Sunday (01/19/2025) before the site gets cut off from everyone entirely, but there’s no guarantee how long it will last and I expect there will be more than a few lawsuits fighting the ban in the aftermath.

So yeah - just a friendly reminder to anyone on here with a Tik Tok account to please back up your content before the site goes down and/or becomes inaccessible if you haven’t already. There are now years’ worth of information at risk of being lost, everything from music videos to captured moments of police brutality to educational material. There are also plenty of videos with misinformation and less-than-tasteful content too, but the point still stands. If you have the means and know-how to archive your videos, now’s the time to do it.