I like the idea of a slow increase over time. I remember Reddit did that one chatroom experiment where you started out small. And then merged with larger and larger rooms. Small rooms had at least a chance to hang and chat and the larger rooms turned into twitch chat spam. To a degree maybe the same could be said for comments, on Reddit now I still see thousands of redundant replies to subjects whereas here it’s definitely still fresh if not shorter chains.
Though in terms of niche topics it may definitely need more traffic somehow. I think reddit benefits a lot from its search indexing and if Lemmy ever began to appear in search traffic more like forums did in early Google I could see that improving.
Agree that the hyperbolic situations would be problematic but luckily tiktok is only one of the many social media options out there. I’d also consider that content like tiktok can be targeted at kids who arent developed enough to make the right choices yet. Taking freedom away is bad but getting hooked on tiktok is hardly a passive choice when it’s the platforms goal to keep you swiping and social influence makes it near impossible to avoid. I’d see it as a grey area when taking choices away. Like removing a lot of extra sugar from school lunches I think was already a goal, as is taking physical fitness in school. There are choices to avoid those options so it’s not a blanket ban on that opportunity, but I definitely don’t see it as a slippery slope.
There will be something new that pops up. Or the US companies out there might just buy tiktok anyways.