Whilst on the lookout for remedies against algorithm distress, I found out about Nostr through Sebastian Hagens, Jurjen de Vries Arnold Hubach & Bert Hubert . Nostr is a decentralised open source social media protocol. I recently gave a talk on what Nostr could mean for music creators, and I will actually be performing on the Nostrdam meetup in Amsterdam next week tuesday!
I heard an insightful perspective from Yuval Noah Harari in a recent DOAC podcast that added to the Nostr narrative: what if platforms would be liable for the damages caused by algorithms, instead of blaming, judging and incidentally censoring the authors?
”I would be very careful about having the codes judge on the content of the production of individual users. But when it comes to algorithms deliberately, routinely spreading a particular type of information, like a conspiracy theory, we can involve the courts. The key issue is who has liability. That it’s the company that is liable for what the algorithm is doing and not the human individual liable for what they are saying” -Yuval Noah Harari (on Steven Bartlett the Diary of a CEO podcast https://share.snipd.com/episode/f16eac1a-d880-4dcb-8d20-583b328ab296)
The nostr protocol offers a way to become independant of the large tech giants, creating tamper proof messages, replicating these messages on many independant servers, using transparent methods of retrieving the messages, and innovating on the business model of keeping the network running.
For instance: what if an open source Nostr client could show a timeline of messages from just the sources you actually follow? Or being able to retain your audience when you move from one app to another? Or discover public messages through an open source algorithm of your own choice?
If you are interested in solving these algorithm and censorship issues in an open source, decentralised manner, I can recommend looking further into Nostr. Read about it, attend one of the upcoming nostr events or download a nostr app like amethyst or damus and give it a try yourself!
- My notes on Nostr https://notes.peterpeerdeman.nl/nostr
- Nostrdam event, October 8th: https://nostrdam.com/
- The talk “Experiencing value for value on Nostr as an independant artist” https://peterpeerdeman.github.io/experiencing-value-for-value-on-Nostr-as-an-independant-artist/1