feat(TikTok): Local favorite videos & following list

[powerfulsaber]

Application

TikTok.

Issue

Without an account, a user is not able to follow creators or favorite videos.

Patch

Allow the user to follow creators and favorite videos without an account (similarly to NewPipe). This data would be stored locally rather than on an account.

I'd suggest implementing an export/import feature of this, so it wouldn't be lost when transferring over devices.

Motivation

TikTok makes it difficult to create an account when taking privacy precautions, such as using a VPN. There's already a patch made to disable the force login prompt, so this is a simply a step further in making it closer to the normal TikTok viewing experience.

This is also beneficial privacy-wise, as your data won't be tied to an account.

Partially inspired by NewPipe.

Acknowledgements

• [X] I have searched the existing issues and this is a new and no duplicate or related to another open issue.
• [X] I have written a short but informative title.
• [X] I filled out all of the requested information in this issue properly.

[JavierFlores09]

What you are asking is quite impossible to do, not due to the following part but rather showing the videos of the people you are "following", it'd require constant calls to TikTok's API and without a user-key you'll most likely get rate-limited very fast.

Quite honestly, if you are this concerned over making a TikTok account, you should probably just use an alternative to it such as YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels, which you may already have an account for.

As for the favorite videos, it could be done but would probably be a bit hard if the favorites tabs can't be hijacked to work without an account

[powerfulsaber]

Thank you for the explanation.

TikTok does allow the creation of new accounts while using a VPN, you just have to hope you're signing up with an IP that has yet been temporarily limited. I was just hoping it'd be possible to implement these features locally to circumvent this annoyance, as I only tend to follow creators and favorite videos, so I don't really need an account.

I've looked into other ways of "following" creators without an account, and I found out about ProxiTok, which provides an RSS feed for every creator. I'll try using this for now, ~~but they might be using a method that somehow avoids the possible rate-limiting you've mentioned, which could help with implementing it as a patch.~~

Edit: there's a page dedicated to the rate-limiting that occurs here.