Loops Joins the Fediverse

We're excited to announce that Loops now federates with the fediverse. After months of development, ActivityPub support has officially entered beta. Your loops can now travel across the open social web.

What This Actually Means

If you're on Loops, you can now follow creators on Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, and any other ActivityPub-powered platform. And yes, they can follow you back. Comment on a loop from your Pixelfed account? That works too. Share a loop to your followers on Mastodon? You got it.

This isn't just about connecting platforms—it's about fundamentally rethinking how social media works. Instead of being trapped in walled gardens, your content, your followers, and your identity can move freely across the open web.

The Technical Deep Dive

For those who love the details (and we know you do), here's what we've built:

Instance Actor & Shared Inbox

Every Loops instance now has its own actor that represents the server itself. This isn't just for show—it handles server-to-server authentication, instance metadata exchange, and those fun edge cases like account deletions and relay subscriptions.

We've also implemented a shared inbox for optimized federation delivery. Instead of hammering your server with individual requests for every follower, remote instances can send activities once to our shared inbox. This dramatically reduces network overhead and makes federation scale better as your instance grows.

HTTP Signatures That Actually Work

Getting HTTP signatures right was... an adventure. We're talking proper request signing with SHA-256 digests, parsing date headers that various servers format differently, and handling edge cases like non-standard port numbers. But it works, and it's secure.

Every federated request is cryptographically signed, meaning you can trust that the Like activity claiming to be from @[email protected] actually came from their server.

WebFinger Discovery

When someone tries to follow @[email protected], their server uses WebFinger to discover your ActivityPub actor. We've implemented this for both individual users and the instance itself, making discovery seamless across the fediverse.

Smart Content Representation

Here's an interesting design decision we made: we use Note objects instead of Video objects for maximum compatibility. Why? Because the fediverse is optimized for notes. Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey—they all handle notes beautifully. By wrapping our video content as notes with video attachments, loops federate seamlessly across the entire fediverse without requiring special handling.

When you post a loop, we're federating:

• A Note object with rich video attachments
• Multiple video encodings for different devices (where supported)
• Generated thumbnails and preview images (where supported)
• Captions and content warnings
• All the interaction capabilities you'd expect

This pragmatic approach means your loops show up properly everywhere, not just on platforms that specifically understand video objects. It's about meeting the fediverse where it is, not where we wish it would be.

Federation-Aware Comments

This one took some thinking. When someone on Mastodon replies to your loop, we needed to handle the conversation threading properly. We implemented a graph-walking validator that traces reply chains to ensure they're actually responding to your content and not just random spam.

Top-level notes? We reject those—Loops is for videos. But replies to videos? Those create proper Comment objects. Replies to comments? Those become CommentReply objects with the correct parent relationships. It's nested conversations that work across platforms.

What's Working Right Now

Following & Discovery: Follow any ActivityPub user, and they can follow you back. Your videos appear in their timeline, their posts appear in yours (if they post videos and your server allows top level Videos from that server).

Cross-Platform Interactions:

• Comment on loops from Mastodon, Pixelfed, or any fediverse platform
• Like videos across instances
• Share (Announce) loops to your followers
• Receive notifications for all federated interactions

Multi-Instance Video Sharing: Post a loop on your instance, and it federates to your followers regardless of which instance they're on. The video stays on your server, but everyone can watch it.

Content Portability: Your content belongs to you. Export your data, move to another Loops instance, and take your followers with you (coming soon™ but the groundwork is there).

The Beta Caveat

Let's be honest: this is a beta release. You might encounter rough edges. Some federation edge cases still need work. Not every platform handles video objects the same way. We're still optimizing video federation performance for instances with thousands of users.

But the core federation works, and works well. We've been federating successfully with Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other platforms in our testing. The foundation is solid.

What's Next

Short-term improvements:

• Enhanced video transcoding for better cross-instance compatibility
• Improved relay support for better content discovery
• More granular privacy controls (followers-only, unlisted, direct)
• Better handling of remote media caching

Medium-term goals:

• Account migration between instances (with follower transfer)
• Federated reports and moderation tools
• Collection support for better content organization
• Live streaming federation (yes, we're thinking about this)

For Instance Admins

If you're running a Loops instance, ActivityPub federation is opt-in during beta. Check your instance settings to enable it. Make sure you've configured your domain properly, set up HTTPS (federation requires it), and allocated enough storage for remote media caching.

We've documented everything in our FEDERATION.md file in the repo, including all the activities we support, how to troubleshoot common issues, and performance tuning recommendations.

The Bigger Picture

Loops isn't just another TikTok clone. We're building something fundamentally different: a short-form video platform that respects your freedom. You own your content. You control your data. You choose your community.

ActivityPub federation is the technical foundation that makes this vision real. It's not perfect, and it's definitely more complex than just spinning up a centralized service. But it's worth it.

Because at the end of the day, social media should connect people, not trap them.

Try It Out

If you're on a Loops instance with federation enabled, try following someone on Mastodon or Pixelfed. Post a loop and watch it federate across the network. See what happens when someone comments from a different platform.

And if you run into issues? Open an issue on GitHub or reach out on the fediverse.

Welcome to the federated future of short-form video. It's going to be wild.

Technical details for the curious: Loops is built on Laravel, Vue 3, and Tailwind, with a custom ActivityPub implementation that handles video-specific use cases. All our federation code will be open source (it already is) because building an open web requires open tools.