The Curated Lists app within Pretty Good Apps is designed to be a proof of concept to show that decentralized curation of simple lists (DCoSL) is possible. To me, it is important to demonstrate that it is *theoretically possible* to curate lists (or anything, for that matter) in a genuinely decentralized fashion. And yet it’s not easy to communicate why this theoretical thing matters.

So the next app in PGA will be Channels, which is intended as proof of concept that decentralized curation not just of lists, but of *graphs* is possible. And hopefully take it one step closer to practical application.

The graph in question will be composed of nodes that are “topics” and edges that organize the topics into hierarchies. For each topic, a list of pubkeys that tend to post content relevant to that topic will also be subject to decentralized curation. The user will then be able to select a “channel” (a topic) and see a feed that is enriched for that topic. Should be a good way to discover new users to follow, among other things.

Without decentralized curation, the biggest challenge in building an app like this is to figure out the list of topics, their arrangement into hierarchies, and how to associate content creators with each topic. The easy (but naive) way to start would be for the app devs to make the graph of topics, but devs may not be aware of all the topics that are of interest to all their users. So the next strategy could be a Reddit-like approach: users can make their own topics (like subreddits), and the topic creator decides which users can post what on that topic. But as we see with subreddits, this would turn each topic into a little fiefdom, lorded over by the topic creator.

So what’s the next step? Decentralized curation. No single entity in charge of the topics tree. No single entity in charge of the list of pubkeys that will be the content creators for each topic. No censorship other than your ability to censor what shows up on your own feed; no fiefdoms other than the authority you exert over your own life.

What qualifies as “decentralized curation” may be considered a dry, boring, theoretical question. But we have to get the theory right before we can genuinely solve these problems.