TikTok Alternative Skylight Surpasses 380,000 Users After U.S. Ownership Deal

Skylight, a TikTok alternative built on open-source technology, is seeing a surge in adoption following concerns sparked by TikTok U.S.’s ownership restructuring last week. The startup, which offers a short-form vertical video app similar to TikTok, says it has surpassed 380,000 users and is continuing to gain momentum following a particularly active weekend.

Founded last year and backed by Mark Cuban and other investors, Skylight is built on the AT Protocol. The same underlying technology powers Bluesky, the decentralized social network with more than 42 million users.

CEO Tori White and CTO Reed Harmeyer co-founded the company. Skylight includes a native video editor, user profiles, and support for liking, commenting, and sharing content. The platform also allows community curators to create and manage custom feeds that other users can follow.

To date, more than 150,000 videos have been uploaded directly to Skylight. Thanks to its AT Protocol integration, the app can also stream video content from Bluesky.

Harmeyer said on Saturday that users played 1.4 million videos on the platform the previous day, marking a threefold increase over the prior 24 hours. He added that sign-ups had climbed more than 150% during the same period. Other metrics showed a more than 50% increase in returning users, a more than 40% jump in average videos watched, and a doubling in the number of posts created.

The spike in activity appears to be linked to growing unease around TikTok’s recent ownership changes, compounded by poorly timed technical issues affecting the app.

Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate. We're working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We're sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon. — TikTok USDS Joint Venture (@tiktokusdsjv) January 26, 2026

On January 22, TikTok announced the formation of TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, a move aimed at complying with an executive order from President Trump requiring the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations to American investors. Under the new structure, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, now owns less than 20% of the entity.

The restructuring followed heightened tensions between the United States and China, which fueled long-standing concerns that TikTok posed national security risks — both through potential data collection on U.S. users and the influence of its recommendation algorithms. More recently, however, some users have shifted their focus to concerns about the new U.S.-based ownership group and its political affiliations.

Those concerns intensified after TikTok released an updated privacy policy that allows the app to collect users’ GPS location data, among other permissions. Users also flagged language indicating that the platform could collect information on immigration status. Although those provisions were not new and were included to comply with state privacy laws, the changes prompted some users to urge others to delete the app.

While it’s unclear how many users actually left TikTok, it’s evident that some sought out alternatives. Over the weekend, White said Skylight added roughly 20,000 new users and continues to grow. So far in January, the app has recorded about 95,000 monthly active users.

White attributed Skylight’s momentum to its open, customizable design and the control it gives both users and creators.

Despite the gains, Skylight remains small compared with TikTok, which has around 200 million monthly active users in the United States. Still, Skylight’s founders believe their approach creates room for long-term growth.

“We’ve seen what happens when a single person controls what shows up in everyone’s feed,” White told TechCrunch. “It damages the relationship between creators and their audiences, and ultimately the health of the platform itself. That’s why we built Skylight Social on open standards. We wanted user and creator control to be guaranteed by the technology — not as a promise that can be revoked, but as a permanent right.”