Riri Bichri burst into tears on Friday morning while discussing news that the Supreme Court had ruled against TikTok, rejecting the company’s arguments against the law that effectively bans it in the United States next week.

“It’s really hitting me because I feel it’s like in a world where there’s so much judgment, TikTok provided a place where I can be free, I can be cringe, I can be who I am,” said Ms. Bichri, a content creator based in New York best known for her 2000s nostalgia parody videos.

“I shouldn’t cry about something so stupid, but it really changed my life,” she added.

For TikTok creators, it’s a sad and stressful time.

In the days leading up to the ruling, creators have been posting memorial tributes and preemptively eulogizing a platform many say has changed their fortunes and given them a sense of community.

“The people that I saw on my For You Page ended up becoming my real life friends,” said Arielle Fodor, who joined TikTok in March 2020.

At the time, she was a kindergarten teacher who had just been sent home as the pandemic began, and she was looking for a substitute for IRL connections.

She found what she was looking for on TikTok and then some, she said in an interview on Friday morning just after the Supreme Court ruling. Like Ms. Bichri, she was also mourning the platform, where she eventually gained 1.3 million followers and became a full-time content creator, leaving her teaching job.

“I listened to the arguments and the writing was on the wall,” Ms. Fodor said of the court’s decision. “I’m disappointed, obviously, but not shocked.”

As scrutiny on TikTok intensified over the last year, Ms. Fodor said she has worked to strengthen her presence on other social media channels.

“All of us have been preparing in a way,” Ms. Bichri said, echoing Ms. Fodor. “No one has really stuck to one platform.”

Some TikTok users already cross-post their content on Instagram, for instance, which introduced its vertical video feature, Reels, in 2020. And YouTube may be poised to draw so-called TikTok refugees. But TikTok is not easily replaced for many content creators, particularly for those who stand to lose income as a result.

“It’s a big source of the way that I make my living,” Ms. Bichri said. “Everyone will have to adapt.”

How exactly they will adapt is not yet clear. For now, creators in the United States are still adjusting to the idea of a world without TikTok.

“It makes me sad. To me, I feel like it’s way more than just social media,” Tareasa Johnson, better known online as Reesa Teesa, said in an interview earlier this week.

Ms. Johnson became an overnight sensation last year for a 50-part video series that dramatically recounted a relationship with a former paramour. The series of TikTok videos is currently being adapted for television.

“I’m one of those people who can honestly say that TikTok completely changed my life ,” she added.

Jonny Carmack was perusing the aisles of a store in his hometown, Danbury, Conn., when he first saw it: a giant strawberry sitting on a shelf.

Mr. Carmack, 32, a content creator, was awe-struck. “I was just like, oh my gosh, it’s so cute,” he said. “It’s so whimsical.”

But this strawberry didn’t come from the vine. In fact, it was a ceramic table with the cartoonish likeness of a strawberry. He purchased the table for $59.99 for his office and redecorated the room with the faux fruit in mind, adding panels of moss to a door and turf to the floor to resemble a garden.

Mr. Carmack is one of many passionate people across the United States who scour the aisles of discount retailers like HomeGoods, T.J. Maxx and Marshalls in search of culinary-inspired stools. Food as furniture has gone viral on social media, with collectors sharing photos of their finds and trading buying tips.

“It’s a huge community,” said Mr. Carmack, who owns about 30 food stools, including a stack of doughnuts, a peppermint and a pink gummy bear. “I was feral for that,” he said of his ceramic ursine figure.

Birdie Wood, too, developed a love of food stools by accident. She was shopping online one day in early 2021 when a stool with the likeness of a hamburger caught her eye. “I started decorating with weird and food-shaped things in 2009, so when I saw that this existed, I was like, this is huge,” she said. The burger was out of stock, but she snagged one on eBay a few weeks later.

She eventually furnished her three-bedroom, one-bathroom home on the South Shore of Long Island, N.Y., where she had recently moved, with the burger as inspiration. Throughout her home are other colorful, oversize objects, including a table shaped like a giant spool of thread, a large multicolored wristwatch and 10 other food stools, including a wedge of cheese. “I sort of based my entire life and personality around this silly burger stool,” she said.

Ms. Wood, 33, a woodworker, recently began building her own food-inspired furniture, with the goal of making objects she can’t find in stores. Her creations include a table with the likeness of a wrapped stick of butter and another resembling a can of Spam.

Ms. Wood said that for collectors like her, much of the appeal of quirky food stools is generational. “I think a lot of millennials specifically or older Gen Zs grew up with the ‘beige’ décor,” she said. “Once we hit the scene, we made it OK to decorate fun and silly.”

“I think that design just became so neutral, so minimalist, so boring for so long,” said Megan Hopp, 37, an interior designer and founder of Megan Hopp Design. She said these stools are millennials’ way of rejecting minimalist aesthetics — including the “billions of cans of gray paint everyone was using forever” — and embracing kitsch.

But not all food stools are created equal. There are hundreds of different designs, and the resale market for stools that are no longer available in stores can be competitive. (One reseller on eBay listed a strawberry stool for $169, more than twice its price at HomeGoods.)

Finding coveted stools often requires careful strategizing, and some dedicated collectors have it down to a science.

Robbie Hornik, 28, who owns about 87 food stools, said HomeGoods stores debut new stools seasonally and usually on the West Coast first. By studying the shopping habits of other food stool collectors on social media, “I’ve kind of calculated how long it takes for them to get here,” said Mr. Hornik, who lives in Syosset, N.Y.

Of course, it also helps to know the right people. “I’ve actually made friends with a couple of the managers and they kind of tell me when they have shipments,” he said.

To cut out the middleman, Mr. Hornik has even tried to source stools directly from vendors and manufacturers, though he has been unsuccessful so far. “There were so many different stools that I wanted and I needed to try and find a faster way to find them,” he said. (In an email to The New York Times, a spokesperson for TJX, the parent company of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods, said the company could not comment on any vendors or products in stores.)

But the thrill of the hunt is also part of the fun for many collectors, including Mr. Carmack, who has built a large following on social media by posting videos about his stool collection and secondhand furniture finds. He has become something of a celebrity to the staff at his local HomeGoods in Danbury — for better or worse.

“The employees, they come right up to me,” he said. “I’m like, oh my gosh, I cannot come here every day. They’re going to have me arrested.”