Why we're here
The internet began open and fragmented.
Web portals like AOL and Yahoo tried to close things and make it feel easy and curated, but browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer reopened it with protocols like HTTP, making those walled gardens feel small and closed off. This openness broke discovery and curation, so we tried things like: PointCast, del.icio.us, Digg, TrapIt, Prismatic, and more. At the same time, social networks starting exploding because they were much better at simplifying the experience and curating based on interests and networks. Instead of hopping from site to site, people built a single profile, added friends, and got personalized feeds. This consolidated people, conversations, and content into a single place.
Somewhere along the way, we outsourced curiosity and agency to opaque and addictive algorithms. At times, it feels like that magical sensation of the early internet is behind us. As new networks and protocols emerge, people are gravitating towards apps that align closer to their world-view and ideologies, while centralized apps continue competing for our attention.
People are struggling to decide where to spend their time and are overloaded with too many decisions, too much content, too much noise, and too much information to keep track of.
Our solution
Siftree solves this by enabling everyone in the world to create their own algorithm on top of the internet itself, providing the curation we now expect, but without taking away the powers of discovery and agency that we need. Alongside social media, there are hundreds of thousands of websites and forums that also contain content we're interested, but they aren't easily discoverable. If we can curate a "feed" on top of the entire internet, we can recreate the algorithmic feeling we enjoy while remaining open and decentralized. Contrary to forum aggregators and RSS feeds, protocols like Nostr and ATProtocol solve the "multiple logins" problem with digital identities and cryptographic signatures so we can engage across sites. Soon we'll all be able to browse and interact on the internet via an owned, digital identity, as opposed to "rented" accounts platforms can easily take away without reason.
Think of Siftree like a lens you control. We don't own the content, we don’t sell your data, we don't sell any advertisements, and we can’t tell you what to see or what to do.
So, how will we make this sustainable? Analytics and Curation.
The consumer insights, market research, and social media analytics markets are huge. Siftree will offer features that analyze the social graph, leveraging AI-powered capabilities that enables all forms of analysis..
Curation of any form takes a lot of work, so the customizable lenses will be a paid feature. Additionally, we'll allow people to monetize the feeds they've created, allowing anyone to see the world the way they see it. A marketplace of lenses.
We will also offer an API, with the goal of being the only company that will actively empower developers to build products grounded in real-time, social conversations from around the world.
The social web is a fractal-like tree of subcultures. It's heavily fragmented across platforms, protocols, lexicons, audiences, and media formats. Our goal is to "sift" through this infinitely expanding tree, index the information, use artificial intelligence to understand it, and power search, discovery, and analytics for the entire world.
See our roadmap here.
See how Siftree works here.
Long-form writings on Nostr here.
