The day after Tiktok: in the US they are puzzled over who will be the replacement

As the threat of a TikTok ban continues to loom, ByteDance is promoting the app Lemon8 as an alternative, while RedNote is attracting interest. However, the same law may apply to all Chinese-owned platforms.

According to the newspaper “New York Post”, on Friday, the Supreme Court of the United States discussed arguments in a case that will determine the future of TikTok in the country. While many users and content creators hope that the ban will not go into effect and they will be able to continue using the application, it seems that the judges are inclined to approve the law that may gradually bring its activity to an end. As the decision nears, some of the approximately 170 million users of the platform in the United States are beginning to wonder: Where will they all move instead?

“There are talks about Lemon8, a visual social media application that focuses mainly on lifestyle content and belongs to the same Chinese company that owns TikTok, the application that appears to be a combination of Instagram and Pinterest, was first launched in Japan in 2020 and gradually expanded to other countries.

In 2023, while members of Congress in Washington were investigating TikTok’s CEO, ByteDance quietly pushed creators to join Lemon8 and offered potential financial incentives. However, due to its ownership, the platform could be subject to the same law that threatens TikTok.

In recent days there has been a surge of interest in RedNote, a Chinese social media app also known as Xiaohongshu. The platform is described by some users as an imitation version of TikTok, and is sometimes compared to Pinterest and Instagram.

If Lemon8 and RedNote are also banned, TikTok users will largely be left with long-standing social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube, which have added features to compete with TikTok in recent years.

Instagram, for example, launched its Reels vertical video feature in 2020 in response to ByteDance’s platform. Initially, some users felt that Reels was underpowered, but its vertical video format is visually similar to TikTok, and some users are already sharing content from TikTok there.

YouTube also tried its luck and introduced “YouTube Shorts” in the same year, allowing the publication of short videos of up to a minute and of course, there is the traditional YouTube video format.

In the past year, TikTok has put an emphasis on longer videos, which may prepare creators and users to switch to creating content that is more suitable for YouTube viewing than YouTube Shorts.

Yomana Jawad, a recipe developer and content creator known as Feel Good Foodie, told the New York Times that she felt prepared for the possibility of a TikTok ban in the US, as she was careful not to rely too much on one platform for her work.

“I’ve been working with Flipboard. I’m trying to figure out Lemon8 and Threads,” said Jawad, 42, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. “There’s always a new platform, and I’m always open to trying new things.”

The readiness of the users of the popular application, with an emphasis on the business owners, may also affect the Tik Tok Israel offices. Currently, the future of the company in Israel is “unclear”, an official employed by the company told “Maariv”, adding that due to the fact that many of the company’s customers are from the USA, the future of the employees and the continued existence of the offices in Israel is “uncertain”.