This is a subfile of the primary AI4Communities post, and won't make any sense unless you read its parent first. It explores how the AI4communities idea would look in decentralised social networks powered by Nostr.
(Notes: This is an early draft. As explained in this newsletter edition, I am publishing these early versions as I develop my thoughts in the hope that constructive comments will help me finish the post. More version control in the footer. What follows are notes from an early version of the AI4Communities post - this, in other words, is version 1).
I’m less familiar with Nostr, but I know that Jack Dorsey, its founder and the guy who launched Bluesky when he ran Twitter, definitely believes in algorithmic choice. My introduction to Nostr came via one of my favourite thinkers in this space, Gordon Brander (6 resources), whose Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr walks you through the various architectures, concluding with the Nostr approach, of which he’s clearly a fan: “You sign messages with your key, then post them to one or more relays. Other users follow one or more relays. When they get a message, they use your key to verify you sent it”.
Currently it's not clear to me how this doesn't result in a splinternet: if two relays don't talk to each other then how do messages find other people not linked to your relay(s)?
But what Brander's piece did convince me (for now) is that the federated services architecture underpinning the ActivityHub-powered Fediverse has a fundamental flaw: "Federated networks become oligopolies at scale", due to general forces seen everywhere: "airline routes, power grids, trains, banks, Bitcoin mining, protein interactions, ecological food webs, neural networks". It happened to email, and now it's happening with the Fediverse, where calls to defederate Threads (which was 10x the rest of the Fediverse when it arrived) were ineffective.
This is one of this wiki's pages managed with the permanent versions pattern described in Two wiki authors and a blogger walk into a bar…