My name is Kyle DeSana, I'm from a suburb of Detroit but currently live in Chicago. I love Detroit sports and tech. I'm currently building Siftree, a customizable algorithm on top of the internet.
I'm a big fan of the Nostr protocol, and enjoy building stuff using this protocol. What is Nostr? I wrote about it 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 products like Mosaic, 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, Taboola, Digg, StumbleUpon, RSS feeds (like Google Reader) 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 sovereignty, curiosity and identity 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. Mental health issues are increasing. Many of us feel overloaded with too much content and too much noise.
We can return to the web we used to have: open, free, and decentralized, but this time with better tech and better curation.
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. There are millions of websites and forums that also contain content we're interested in, but they aren't easily discoverable. If we can curate a custom recommendation system on top of the entire internet (that's open and transparent), we can recreate the algorithmic discovery 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 - enabling us to actually engage with each other across websites. 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, Curation, APIs.
The consumer insights, market research, and social media analytics markets are huge. Siftree will offer features to businesses that power new forms of opinion and narrative analysis. Social media analytics is outdated and gatekept for corporations; it's time we upgrade it and democratize access.
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.