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i often see people talking about protocols alone, as if they inherently provide greater good than platforms. but there are many kinds of protocols, and only one is actually desirable.

you can have a protocol that interacts solely with one platform; an API is a protocol! and this protocol can easily be obscured by simply not documenting it. if only your app uses the API, it’s still an API, and it’s still a protocol that your app uses to communicate with your platform’s servers. suffice to say, you do not want this.

so then, they just have to be documented and open to participants, right? that’s what the fediverse is with ActivityPub, at least… except that’s also what email is, and nobody uses any email server other than google’s, microsoft’s, or whatever other megacorp’s the most popular in their country. in fact, you really can’t; if you try and start your own mail server, your emails won’t just go into spam folders, they’ll be outright dropped by all of the megacorps. even when using an open protocol, you are not in control.

in other words, the email/ActivityPub model of federation incentivizes centralization (for content moderation, to combat spam, etc.), to such an extent that it becomes possible for the centralized options to become the ONLY available options. federation does not scale, it goes back to platforms at that point.

so what’s the solution? eliminate platforms entirely, eliminate the distinction between client and server: create peer-to-peer networks. P2P is what we mean when we say protocols are better. when there is no server, it becomes impossible for servers to become ever greater. only when there is no platform are you in control.