Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech
The "Protocols, Not Platforms" debate is naive and misses the point. Here is why:<p>- Let's say someone builds a social network protocol (including messaging, photo sharing etc).<p>- Let's be generous and say this protocol becomes so successful it turns into a de facto standards.<p>- The market will rush to build the best client for the protocol. Facebook, Google, maybe an outsider will come up with the best client that has all the features and added goodies (magic emojis, special video effects, something new etc).<p>- People wanting to get on the networks will never google the protocol just like people who want to get an email client do not google "imap". They just google the most popular client such as gmail.<p>- Overtime, the most popular client will get a quasi-monopoly and will become incompatible with the rest of clients, no one will notice except for us nerds on HN.<p>- This already happened with xmpp (facebook messenger, google hangouts and others used to be on xmpp).<p>Now you might say, "but how about email"? Well, first of all, email is an oligopoly and it's practically impossible for individuals to set up their own servers and expect their emails to get delivered all of the time. So I wouldn't call email such a great success story. Another thing is that email is work oriented and so it makes sense to keep compatibility between businesses. Email also arrived very early and had time to spread slowly at the beginning of the internet among various small to big players, which explains why no company could take over it.<p>For all these reasons, I do not believe in a magical protocol that would save us from big tech. The protocol in itself would not be enough. A non-profit would need to be in charge of the most popular client such as Mozilla with Firefox, but even then this  did not turned out as expected although Chromium is open source so yay.