Over the past few weeks, Loops has opened up its public beta to early adopters and enthusiasts looking to put the platform through its paces. The app is reminiscent of TikTok or Instagram Reels, but is decidedly a Fediverse-first product.

Before we dive in to this early first look, it’s important to understand that Loops is still a fairly young project. There are still a number of promised features that haven’t landed yet, and some of the currently available features are a bit limited. Loops hasn’t yet released its source code or enabled federation, but project lead Dan Supernault has stated that he will do both in the near future.

Getting Started

Onboarding with Loops is a little bit rocky at the moment, but it’s important to understand that these are hurdles that come from launching a brand new service. A current bottleneck involves approving new accounts and sending out emails. At the moment, these trickle out slowly, as the service is rate-limited to approximately one invite email per second.

You can request a beta sign-up here. Once you have an account, sign in to the main Loops website, fill out your details, and scroll down to “Get the App”. That section will provide you with links to the iOS Testflight program, as well as an Android APK.

Using the App

Right now, the primary method for interacting with Loops is through the official Android and iOS clients. There isn’t a public client API yet, although that’s anticipated to come soon. Despite this, someone has already reverse-engineered Loops and published an API spec. There’s even a third-party Web client!

The Main Screen

For anyone who’s ever used TikTok, Snapchat, or Vine, you’re going to feel right at home. The main timeline is a “For You” feed where individual videos take up the entirety of the screen, one clip at a time.

All of the typical interactions and buttons one would expect are there: likes, comments, and following are present. Currently, the app lacks a dedicated following feed, but Dansup confirms that this feature will be coming soon. Users will be able to enjoy both the “For You” feed alongside a more traditional linear timeline.

Comments

Comments are pretty basic for the time being, and are pretty much relegated to a pull-up drawer that doesn’t expand to a full-page view.

The latest public build of the app includes threaded comments for replies. Hopefully, we’ll continue to see polish and improvements get incorporated over time. One anticipated impending feature is comment controls, which will allow users to specify who can reply to a Loop.

Notifications

Basic notifications landed in a recent beta build. They’re relatively simple for the time being, and it doesn’t seem like the service incorporates push notifications across both Android and iOS yet. These are being actively worked on, and hopefully we’ll see something comparable to what Pixelfed currently offers.

Discovery and Search

Loops ships with limited tools for finding people and content at the moment. The Discovery tab features a profile carousel for accounts that the app thinks you might be interested in, with an easy way to pop into profiles and see what they have to offer.

Hopefully, it will be possible to see trending loops and topics in the very near future. The project appears to be using a similar approach to discovery that Pixelfed is doing, where a stream of content and profiles are highlighted for all instances to see.

Search, unfortunately, isn’t yet up to scratch with other Fediverse platforms. At the moment, there isn’t a way to search for posts related to a topic within the app, although you can search for profiles.

Posting

One of the biggest surprises of Loops is that the current version lacks any kind of built-in camera or editor. Dan has teased something big over the past few months regarding posting capabilities, but it isn’t yet present in preview builds for the app.

What this ultimately means is that you’ll need to use a separate source for creating and editing your videos. One available option for mobile is CapCut by Bytedance, but we’re currently experimenting with desktop editing and motion graphics using a combination of Pikimov, Penpot, and KDEnlive.

Final Thoughts

Loops shows a tremendous amount of promise. The app is polished and easy to use, and could very much attract a new kind of user to the Fediverse. At the moment, the fledgling service doesn’t have a lot of unique or interesting content, with quite a few users opting to re-upload TikTok videos instead.

The current areas Loops needs to focus on the most involve fleshing out discovery and search, enabling federation, and making the video creation process as easy as possible. If it can nail these aspects down, short-form video may have a bright future in the Fediverse.

The Good

• Loops is polished and easy to use.
• The client is available for Android and iOS
• A bunch of people are already using it!
• New features are rapidly coming in during this development phase.

The Bad

• No source code release or federation yet.
• Lack of built-in recording / editing tools
• Discovery and search currently feel really limited.
• No public API or ecosystem yet.

The Ugly

• Onboarding for the main instance was really slow.
• Loops is only accessible through official mobile clients and a third-party Web client.
• A lot of existing Loops videos are TikTok reuploads.
• The platform desperately needs a dedicated community of content creators.
• It would be amazing if my Loops videos could get cross-posted as Pixelfed Stories.

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