TikTok has taken the social media market by a storm. It has taken a comfortable position on the top 10 social media platforms. Sharing and communicating with friends and family is great, but social media can be time and data sinkhole. Considering TikTok is a Chinese company, it makes it even more concerning because companies in china work together with their government to censor dissent and unpopular opinions. With TikTok, that power breaks boundaries.
We’d recommend a decentralized open-source platform like diaspora, but not everyone is comfortable moving all their family, friends, conversations and memory to a new platform. But fortunately, there’s a TikTok private frontend ready for usage. And it’s open-source and self-host able too.
ProxiTok is a project that’s trying to create a privacy friendly frontend for TikTok. The project is new and has issues, but it’s making progress where no alternative exists. This is the only project to follow with a goal of watching TikTok videos in private. Use it with redirect extensions to switch to an instance when you click on a TikTok link on your browser.
The developers host the project on GitHub and use PHP and JavaScript to scrape and play videos from TikTok. TikScraperPHP is a scraper API used by the developer. They host the official instance on Heroku.
What is and isn’t working?
Currently visiting an individual video with a link switched to a ProxiTok instance work. The hashtag feed also works, but the videos are ancient.
- Individual video Links
- Hashtag page
- Discover feature
- Download videos
- Audio extraction
User pages, RSS feed, trending aren’t operational at the time of writing this post. The developer is, however, active and trying to fix these issues on GitHub.
To conclude
I hope this project gathers momentum and gets more people working on it to provide regular updates and bug fixes. It is only one of its kind right now to browse TikTok in private without the tracking and complete privacy. But TikTok could change the tiniest of things and break this if it gets too many users. Only time will tell. Until then, enjoy TikToks without using TikTok.
