Oct 17, 2022
Three Frequency highlights from Unfinished Live 2022
You may have seen that Frequency recently headed to NYC for Unfinished Live 2022. This was not your average tech conference or event. You could say it was part conference, part conversation space, part immersive art experience and part “collaboratory” workshop. The convergence of a diverse set of leading voices across tech, academia, policy and beyond aligns with our belief that to further our mission — to free social networks from platforms — requires a new level of collaboration, stretching beyond technologists, transcending tech solutionism and retooling the fundamental way technology is built. The Unfinished Live event for us was a physical manifestation of this concept, as well as a sandbox to explore ideas, form new ecosystem connections, and share more on the project and who we’ve been collaborating with.
The Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) demonstrates new value in “decentralized shared state”
Braxton Woodham, co-creator of Frequency, talked about how blockchain technology can push past what many think of as Web3 today, beyond the DeFi and NFT use cases that fill the news. He pointed to the development of the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), a technology breakthrough that enables us for the first time in human history to have what he calls a “decentralized shared state” in social networking. Today, the infrastructure behind social media profiles and feeds, product reviews, and the global search index that Google dominates is centralized. This data is stored in private databases and proprietary systems. But by leveraging blockchain technology in DSNP’s design, we can decentralize this infrastructure, taking it out of privately owned, centralized systems — and ensure that it is universally accessible and shared. This is the approach behind the open-source DSNP. (Frequency is the first production-grade implementation of DSNP.)
Woodham talked about the importance of building an ecosystem of diverse entrepreneurs and working to equip them with tools that can enable sustainable businesses and products. Frequency is a catalyst for that ecosystem by delivering new tools and infrastructure to support developers in their work to build apps that serve people over platforms, and can even open the opportunity for a new kind of compounding network effects.
“We can’t do it alone. It can’t be one person’s idea. It can’t be one tech group. It needs to be a movement.” — Braxton Woodham, co-creator, Frequency
A Frequency and Starling Labs collab is on the horizon
One collaborative effort revealed on the Unfinished Live mainstage was between Frequency and Starling Labs, which is headed up by Jonathan Dotan. Using the Frequency protocol, Starling Labs will prototype ways in which they can help fact-checkers get accurate information — and fact-checkers can hold journalists accountable for their reporting.
Dotan equated the current state of disinformation as a disease and questioned how we can get antibodies into the system to “fight back against the virus of misinformation.” Holding journalists accountable is one way to remedy the disease, and fact-checking is a critical way to do that. However, you can’t and wouldn’t want just one fact-checker; rather, you’d want a network of fact-checkers who are part of a diverse ecosystem, with strength in numbers and resilience through diversity.
The goal is ultimately to find ways of helping fact-checkers do their work, and to ensure that their fact-checking has not been manipulated. Starling Labs will be bringing a variety of fact-checking networks that are accredited and trained to the table to create a reference architecture for a starting point. “What’s critical about the work that we do with Frequency is that as an open source technology, we have the confidence not only that we can allow a variety of voices to emerge, but that even if their information is immutable, it’s not locked within one single ledger,” Dotan said. “That’s the beauty of this — that we can use networks of networks with digital technology to help networks of networks of fact-checkers.” Dotan added that they’ll be looking at elections, focusing on five different elections over the next two years.
A tech school in Marseille, France, piloted a program with Frequency for decentralized social media ideation
A free, inclusive technology school in France, La Plateforme, in collaboration with Project Liberty, created an educational program and boot camp looking at specific communities in Marseille. They were tasked with imagining and building social applications to support various unique communities and interests. The exercise was to work directly with the people who use social media every day to uncover how a group might appropriate a social network using a decentralized infrastructure.
“Marseille presented a pertinent use case to explore because of its natural array of small communities that have throughout the history of the city kind of organized themselves in a very, very autonomous and decentralized way,” explained Vytas Jankauskas on the Unfinished Live mainstage.
We look forward to heading back to Unfinished Live next year! In the meantime, you can view all the speaking sessions, including those featuring Frequency, in the Unfinished Live video library.
