You can’t play on both sides of the Great Firewall

TikTok is web2, would social media popular with web3 be so different, eg drakula.app?

I might be missing something, but I don't think there's anything decentralized about the Drakula app. Their value prop is that you can earn money via tokens, and that is enabled by the EVM.

I guess if you operate a client, you'd have to follow the country's laws.

So, if TikTok was a decentralized protocol and the most popular US client was ran by a Chinese company, I think they'd face the same problems. And the Apple-Google duopoly could probably ban all the alternative Chinese clients.