Comparative analysis of digital practices related to cultural heritage on TikTok and Nostr

Julián De La Fuente Prieto^*César Pérez Herranz

• University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Spain

This study examines how cultural heritage circulates and is reinterpreted on two contrasting digital ecosystems: TikTok, a highly algorithmic and centralized platform, and Nostr, a decentralized protocol based on open infrastructures. The research explores how people engage with heritage through these environments, focusing on the tensions between visibility and preservation, and the strategies they deploy to disseminate, reinterpret, and protect cultural assets. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines quantitative analysis of content flows, actors, and thematic patterns with qualitative digital ethnography that captures situated practices and discourses. Findings reveal two distinct logics of mediation: TikTok privileges brevity, emotional appeal, and replicability, favoring spectacularized representations of material heritage, while Nostr emphasizes persistence, traceability, and collaborative curation, enabling a more balanced presence of material, intangible, and natural heritage. These differences are not merely stylistic but infrastructural, shaping what becomes visible, how meanings are negotiated, and which forms of participation are possible. The analysis highlights how digital practices—ranging from viral challenges and memes to open-data initiatives and distributed archiving—operate as mechanisms of inclusion and cultural resistance. By comparing these two environments, the study contributes to understanding how platform governance and affordances influence cultural heritage in the digital age and suggests that strategies combining visibility and care are essential to sustain heritage as a common good in networked societies.