Before Vine’s die-hard fans said goodbye, they wanted to reminisce. The short-form-video app, which shut down in 2017, created lots of viral moments (“And they were roommates …”) and propelled a number of internet creators into the mainstream. It was unlike anything else on the internet at the time: You can still sometimes see the refrain “RIP Vine” thrown around on social media. But for the most part, everybody has moved on. Two of Vine’s biggest stars, Logan Paul and Shawn Mendes, are still plenty famous.

I immediately thought of Vine this morning, when the Supreme Court upheld a law that requires TikTok to be sold by its Chinese parent company or face a ban in the United States. After I saw the news I then checked TikTok. The app was a hotbed of nostalgia, with many users reposting their earliest videos from several years ago. The ruling is the latest twist in the ongoing saga over the app’s fate: For more than four years, TikTok has been plagued by questions about its ties to the Chinese government. Unless there’s a last-minute intervention—still possible!—the app could conceivably shut off on Sunday. (After the Supreme Court’s decision, Joe Biden’s administration announced that it would leave enforcement of the ban to Donald Trump.)

[Read: The internet is TikTok now]

It’s a lot of fanfare and suspense over an app that, well, just isn’t all that important. There’s no denying TikTok has had a significant impact on American culture. Its kitschy trends, given names like “coastal grandmother,” influence the stores Americans shop at and the products they buy. Why were Stanley cups suddenly everywhere last year? Blame TikTok. Artists are encouraged to create music that might spark a dance challenge on the app. This is part of what TikTok does well: Its algorithm serves users ultra-personalized content, increasing engagement.

But though Americans might be listening to music or shopping for clothing that was made with TikTok in mind, a majority of them are not scrolling the app itself. According to a Pew survey released last year, only a third of U.S. adults said they had ever used TikTok. YouTube touches far more Americans, with 83 percent of adults reporting that they use the platform. Although TikTok is often referred to as the Gen Z app, a larger share of 18-to-29-year-olds are on Snapchat and Instagram.

To some degree, TikTok users seem at peace with knowing they have other options. Few people have flocked to Capitol Hill to protest the ban. For the most part, celebrities are not speaking out about just how dire the stakes of a TikTok blackout could be. Online, people are expressing their dismay with sardonic humor: tearfully saying goodbye to the hypothetical “Chinese spy” that’s supposedly been observing their TikTok behavior all these years. Millions have downloaded another Chinese app, Xiaohongshu, whose name translates to “little red book” in English.

[Read: It’s just an app]

TikTok would be the first major social-media platform to face an outright ban in the U.S., but its demise would not be so unfamiliar. Even apart from Vine, Millennials and Gen X users spent their youth on platforms that also one day just disappeared, or became otherwise unrecognizable. Tumblr went through a number of changes that gutted the once-thriving blogging platform. Users eventually find new homes elsewhere: Facebook overtook MySpace, only to cede its cultural cache to Instagram, and TikTok itself absorbed Musical.ly. It’s all part of the larger cycle of migration that has always defined social media. The same will likely be true with TikTok. So many social platforms have already cribbed from the app and feature similar algorithmic feeds that keep you scrolling. As Hana Kiros wrote yesterday, “The app might get banned in the United States, but we’ll still be living in TikTok’s world.”

This isn’t to say a TikTok ban wouldn’t be felt. Influencers with big TikTok followings will have to fight for attention on other platforms that may have different audiences and mechanisms for success. Small-business owners, in particular, may materially suffer. Restaurants are one viral video away from waking up to a line down the street, a designer just one hashtag off from selling out their new product. The app’s boon for businesses has been abetted by TikTok Shop, through which users can directly buy items featured in the videos on their feed. Those who went all in on TikTok will surely take a hit as they attempt to set up elsewhere online, but in all likelihood, they will recover.

When I opened TikTok this morning, many of the videos that users were reposting in farewell to the app featured trends I barely remembered from the early pandemic: Morning routines soundtracked by Powfu’s 2020 song “Death Bed,” and exaggerated lip-syncing to anime. Those videos are a testament to how quickly the internet moves on. In a few years, TikTok’s most defining moments, like Vine’s catchphrases and Tumblr’s main characters, will largely have been forgotten.

What’s going on with TikTok right now? The app was expected to be banned in the United States this coming Sunday, when the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is set to go into effect. But several possible turns of events could save it—a last-minute sale, a surprise judgment from the Supreme Court, or intervention from the Biden administration. An official told NBC News last night, somewhat firmly, that it was “exploring options” to prevent the ban from taking effect. “Americans shouldn’t expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday,” the unnamed official said. But then, today, Bloomberg reported that the administration will not intervene on behalf of the app, citing two anonymous officials with knowledge of the plans. Who knows! If all else fails, President-Elect Donald Trump has also reportedly expressed a desire to save the app.

If TikTok does indeed get banned or directly shut off by its parent company, it would be a seismic event in internet history. At least a third of American adults use the app, as do a majority of American teens, according to Pew Research Center data. These users have spent the past few days coming to terms with the app’s possible demise—and lashing out however they could think to.

Some have been posting satirical videos in which they say goodbye to an imaginary Chinese spy that they pretend was personally assigned to watch them and tinker with the recommendation algorithm on their behalf. Many more have been spitefully downloading another Chinese app, Xiaohongshu, which is referred to in English as RedNote and functions like a hybrid of TikTok and Instagram. It has shot to the top of the App Store rankings, and Reuters reports that more than 700,000 new users joined in just two days.  

[Read: The internet is TikTok now]

Earlier this week, I downloaded it myself to see what was going on—most of my feed was quickly populated by videos tagged with #TikTokRefugee. American and Chinese users alike appear to be reveling in brief moments of absurd cultural exchange. I saw a weird amount of content glorifying Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which seems to be a common experience on the app so far. Much of the text on RedNote is in Mandarin. This has become the subject of further jokes as well as a marketing opportunity for the language-learning app Duolingo (which has reported a surge in new Mandarin learners).

RedNote is not particularly usable for English-speakers. It also seems likely to be subject to the same legislation that is (currently) set to kill TikTok, because of its Chinese ownership. The mass downloading, then, is driven not by practicality, but by a mix of curiosity, pettiness, and that special type of half-snotty, half-sincere rebellion so common online. A viral post saying “Not only do I willingly give my data to China but I also freely give my heart” is obviously a joke. But other users who had posted on TikTok about moving to RedNote told me that they were serious about it and genuinely viewed the impending TikTok ban as a free-speech issue.

Mia DeLuca, a 24-year-old TikTok user from New Jersey who has joined RedNote, told me that she sees the popularity of the app as sending a deliberate message to U.S. lawmakers—“a way for us to stand our ground.” Abby Greer, 27 and from Chicago, told me she was aware that social-media platforms derive their value from user data and that she specifically wanted to “hand” her own data “off to the people that will upset Congress the most.”

In banning TikTok—unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells it to an American company—Congress cited concerns about national security and Chinese propaganda. Critics of the ban have argued that the national-security concerns are vague, that such a ban is legally dubious under the First Amendment, and that politicians are being disingenuous about their motivations in wanting American young people off the super-popular app—that they are just taking the opportunity to make a ham-fisted move to curtail social-media use.

Britton Copeland, a 26-year-old full-time content creator from Nashville, told me that downloading RedNote rather than an American-owned app was an act of defiance against what she perceives as exactly this kind of government overreach. TikTok, she said, was “being singled out because it is a platform that allows us to speak freely, without control.” She was optimistic that seeing RedNote at the top of the App Store charts could pressure Congress to vote in favor of a bill introduced by a handful of Democrats that would delay the ban by 270 days. (This appears to be a lost cause, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer suggested earlier today.) “I hope that this has been a wakeup call that my generation takes censorship very seriously, and we will find a way to make our voices heard,” she told me.

This is where things get a little convoluted and nonsensical. Most Americans downloading RedNote probably don’t even know what its content policies are, given that they are, again, in Mandarin. Those terms of service appear to be highly restrictive, as TikTok’s were before it faced significant pressure to hew closer to American norms regarding online speech and was most ardently criticized for removing or minimizing a wide range of content discussing LGBTQ issues and experiences. New users of RedNote have already noticed similar takedowns, and reporters have pointed out that political content is heavily censored on the app.

Of course, it would seem far more logical for Americans to move over to Instagram Reels, the shortform-video product that Meta created to compete with TikTok. Many will. But some TikTok users that I spoke with resented Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally. One referenced his public statements about TikTok’s possible dangers. (In a 2019 speech that name-checked TikTok just as it was growing popular in the U.S., he cited social-media apps exported from China as one of the biggest threats to free speech worldwide.) Another referenced indirect lobbying efforts by Meta that may have contributed to the passage of the anti-TikTok bill. “Knowing that Meta lobbied for this bill to pass makes me want to disengage with their apps entirely,” Kris Drew, a 27-year-old TikTok user from Texas, told me. Greer expressed even more disdain. “I won’t touch Instagram,” she said. Of Zuckerberg, she added, “The last thing I want to do is give him the satisfaction.”

[Read: The age of social media is ending]

The RedNote surge aside, TikTok’s rapidly approaching deadline represents the end of an era in online life and a strange moment for many—even those who don’t consider themselves ardent users. The ban is unpopular and has become even less popular over the past two years among all kinds of Americans. Though it is known as the Gen Z app, tens of millions of other Americans use TikTok; many have fond associations with it stemming from the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when they first turned to it for entertainment and connection to the outside world. (Writing in Bookforum, the author Charlotte Shane described the app as “a precious source of solace during an unendingly precarious time.”)

Platform exodus is usually somewhat voluntary. Take for example the #DeleteFacebook movement, which came in a few waves during the first Trump administration, or the reports of large numbers of users leaving Elon Musk’s X, an outflow that has also gone through phases. People first looked to Mastodon before Meta launched Threads in the summer of 2023—but now Meta is following in Musk’s footsteps by rolling back content-moderation policies, so many find that Bluesky makes more sense. Although it’s often the case that a platform becomes inhospitable to a large segment of its user base for any number of business reasons (Tumblr’s emptying-out in 2018) or political reasons (Livejournal’s in 2017), it’s relatively rare for one to disappear overnight. The most well-known example is that of the shortform-video app Vine, but it’s never happened with a platform of TikTok’s size and economic import.

This is a unique situation and people are responding to it with a unique sort of stylized strangeness. Every time I check the X feed, I see another viral bit of gallows humor about the whole thing. For example: “If the government bans rednote i’m just going to start printing out my browser history every night before i go to bed and dropping it off at the Chinese consulate the next morning on my way to work.” That one’s got 118,000 likes and counting.