TikTok is testing a new “Nearby” feed with select users in Southeast Asia that displays local content to users, alongside a location tag feature for creators
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2022 Southeast Asia test is the early rung of an arc that eventually reached the US: four years later, TikTok launched an opt-in Local Feed tied to travel, news, events, shopping, and dining after changing its terms of service. The Nearby experiment — local content surfaced to users, location tags opened to creators — is where that location-ranking machinery was first being worked out.
It also replays a familiar playbook: Instagram ran a location-based stories test back in 2017, and TikTok has repeatedly validated features through small-batch rollouts, as with its later full-screen mode test.
First-order effects
- Select Southeast Asian users get a second surface alongside For You that ranks content by proximity, while creators in the test gain location tags as a new discovery lever for their videos.
Second-order effects
- Local businesses and event organizers become addressable through creator-tagged content rather than paid ads alone, pressuring rivals like Instagram — which tested location stories years earlier — to keep pace on hyperlocal discovery.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds toward the US Local Feed launch, recommendation systems split from one global interest graph into stacked location- and intent-specific feeds, making geography a first-class ranking signal and pushing platforms to rewrite terms of service around location data.
The trend: Social feeds are splintering from a single global algorithmic stream into layered local and intent-based surfaces, with TikTok's Nearby-to-Local-Feed progression as the clearest example.