Sherwood News

Could TikTok’s sister app, Lemon8, offer a lifeline for ByteDance and creators?

When life gives you laws you don’t like, push Lemon8.

1/9/25 11:55AM

Tomorrow marks one of the biggest days in recent history for ByteDance, and for the most screen-addicted Americans in your life, as representatives from the Chinese tech giant make last-ditch appeals to the Supreme Court to try to divert the US ban on the company’s flagship app, TikTok.

As things stand, a bipartisan bill signed off by Joe Biden last April means that the short-form social-media behemoth would be outlawed in the US on January 19 (next Sunday), unless ByteDance sells the platform to an American company, or the Supreme Court intervenes, or President-elect Donald Trump intervenes, or some as yet unknown outcome saves the app, which reportedly counts more than 170 million users in the US.

While a ban wouldn’t automatically wipe TikTok from those 170 million Americans’ devices before they could say the word “rizzler,” new users wouldn’t be able to download it, and a ban on updates would eventually make the platform practically unusable.

Public support for the ban, proposed due to safety concerns around sensitive user data, has been dwindling, with millions of Americans already looking to another ByteDance app as an alternative if the ban goes through.

According to data from site-traffic tracker Similarweb, more than 2.3 million unique visitors clocked just over 5 million page views on the landing page for Lemon8 in America last month. That number has grown as TikTok creators — some of whom are being paid to do so by ByteDance — push users to the photo- and video-sharing “lifestyle community” TikTok alternative, per Axios.

Though Lemon8, which launched in the US in early 2023 but didn’t take off in the same way as TikTok, might not be the safest port in this particular storm. Indeed, the divest-or-ban part of the bill reportedly applies to other properties owned or operated by ByteDance, meaning that even the replacement app’s future could be in peril.

Jon Keegan12/5/25

Report: SpaceX planning for IPO late next year

SpaceX has told investors that it is planning for an IPO in late 2026, according to a report from The Information.

Elon Musk’s rocket company is in talks for a share sale for employees and investors that would put the company’s valuation at $800 billion, making it the world’s most valuable private company, recapturing that crown from OpenAI.

Per the report, all of SpaceX including Starlink would be listed as one company, rather than spinning off Starlink, which Musk had discussed a few years ago.

SpaceX Tells Investors It’s Aiming For Late 2026 IPO

Per the report, all of SpaceX including Starlink would be listed as one company, rather than spinning off Starlink, which Musk had discussed a few years ago.

Rani Molla

12/5/25

What prediction markets think will happen with Apple’s CEO

People inside the company say executive changes are coming, The Information reports.

Rani Molla

The Netflix Effect

12/5/25

How much could Netflix charge if a subscription included HBO Max?

Here’s what streaming companies, many of which offer streaming bundles, charge now.

Rani Molla12/5/25

Meta reignites on-again, off-again relationship with news organizations with multiple AI content licensing deals

Meta has a long and tumultuous relationship with news organizations: first flooding them with traffic, then cutting it off; declaring news a priority, then deprioritizing it in people’s feeds; even hiring its own team to curate breaking news before abruptly disbanding it.

Now it seems media companies are back in Meta’s good graces. The social media company has struck a number of content licensing deals with publishers — including USA Today, People, CNN, Fox News, and The Daily Caller — in order to use information from their articles in Meta’s AI tools, Axios reports. The company first inked an AI news deal with Reuters last year.

Meta has been integrating its AI chatbots across its suite of products, and these licensing deals, which the company reportedly plans to expand to more news organizations, will give users better access to real-time information.

Exclusive: Meta strikes multiple AI deals with news publishers

Millie Giles12/5/25

Cloudflare just went down again, but apparently only for 20 minutes this time

Another day, another massive network outage taking down huge sections of the internet... and, once again, the cause of the hiccup was Cloudflare.

On Friday morning, the American IT giant reported that a change made to “how Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall parses requests” caused its network to “be unavailable for several minutes.”

Roughly 20 minutes later, the company said that “a fix has been implemented,” helping to soothe the stock’s losses after falling as much as 6% in premarket trading, according to Bloomberg. Shares of Cloudflare are trading about 2% lower at the time of writing.

Users reported that sites including LinkedIn, Zoom, Fortnite, Shopify, and Coinbase were all made unavailable by the outage — or at least they would’ve reported that, if Downdetector weren’t also down, per The Verge. Even so, some are still seeing issues as the service supposedly gets back on its feet.

Cloudflare went down only last month, though that time the network was down for roughly three hours and took OpenAI, X, and “League of Legends” with it — and that incident followed in the digitally disruptive footsteps of Amazon Web Services, which saw a major outage in October lasting some 15 hours.