Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

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Just sharing this longread that I think will be interesting to folks here

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Thank you for sharing! Next day I will read. Anyway, I totally agree with this: build protocols, not platforms. Indeed: build FREE protocols, not platforms.

A fantastic example of free speech protocol is XMPP open protocol for instant messaging, I use it from many months with my friends, and is fantastic. I can choose in witch server my data will pass and there are a lot of different software for every platforms. This is really decentralized! And is born in 1999, many multinational company as copied its technology for doing business (Whatsup, Google Talk, Grinder, ecc…).

Here some easy guide that explain XMPP better.
For this fact that is an open protocol (and some other reason) actually is my favorite messages system (over Whatsup, Telegram, Signal, Threema, Delta Chat…).

Thinking a protocol for the music (or something similar) I think is the way, could be a long way, but the most correct. IMHO

Open protocols allow technologies to be more open, and not to allow a single or a few companies/multinational corporations to seize it. These companies in fact, through their competitive modes almost always seek maximizing their own earnings as their first objective and not improving the life of human beings through the given technology.

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So I finally finished reading this and while I agree with the recommendation, I’m a little wary of some of the context it’s rooted in ideologically and I’m wondering if others have thoughts on these things.

Equality in the marketplace

I think the main problem with the text is that it relies heavily on the idea of “marketplace of ideas,” leaning heavily on the idea that protocols are actually good for markets specifically because they make competition more perfect (because there’s better knowledge, transparency, etc). So I’m obviously not opposed to the latter, but it’s the idea that these are in service to encourage better market creation that I find a little worrisome, and certainly something that open source and tech grapple with a lot. Rather than thinking of protocols as a commons, they’re a public commodity used to prop up a private market, and equates this private marketplace with democracy, a classic acrobatic leap free market fundamentalism.

This, then, presents a more democratic approach, in which the marketplace of filters is enabled to compete.

I think this is highlighted by some of the contradictions the author unwittingly stumbles upon:

If Google really messed up Gmail or did problematic things with this service, it is not difficult for people to move to a different email system and to retain access to everyone they communicate with.

Yes, you are free to move from Google whenever, but I, a technically savvy user who knows how to do this, and wants to do this, haven’t, because of the large sunk cost into this one email address, despite me not actually benefiting from any of the UI things google supposedly supplies because I don’t use google interfaces. And because Google can endlessly pour money into their platform because of their vast amounts of accrued capital, another service won’t be able to compete due to just sheer market size. Gmail is not as powerful as protonmail (or name a non-VC backed company). Its market power makes it much more powerful. Even if you are “free to leave.” It really reminds me of that Marxist phrase

There would probably be experiments with different types of business models involving both the data store services—which might charge for premium access and storage (as well as security)—much as services like Dropbox and Amazon Web Services do today

I think that sheer market size problem is underscored by exactly this call out to Amazon Web Services. The author thinks that by providing protocols for web communcation we’ll be free from corporate power, but ultimately the people who’s servers we run the internet on still own a massive monopoly on those servers. And here, again, having capital lets you pour money into building servers.

I guess all that to say that I think about this quote from Capital Volume One pretty regularly:

This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.

On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.

  • Capital Volume 1, Chapter 6

Crypto

Then there’s the stuff about crypto:

In the last few years, with the development of cryptocurrencies and tokens, it has become theoretically possible to build a protocol that uses a cryptocurrency or a token that has some value attached to it, with the value of those items growing in conjunction with usage. A simple way of looking at this is that a token-based cryptocurrency is the equivalent of equity in a company—but rather than the value being tied to the financial success of the company, the value of a crypto token is tied to the value of the overall network.
[..]
thus, as the protocol is more widely used, demand for the currency/token increases, while the supply remains constant or expands along a previously designed growth plan.
[..]
In theory, under such a system, if it were to catch on, the appreciation in value of the tokens/currency could help fund the ongoing maintenance and operation of the protocol—effectively eliminating the historical problem of funding for open protocols that helped create the modern internet.

I think what’s standing out to me here is how important being a first mover in all of this is–whether it’s developing Gmail or Outlook or a crypto currency that generates income because you were the first to hold the token, and other people who use the currency hold it because they think it will be worth more in the future, all relies on endless growth of the protocol. What if the protocol reaches its limits? What if there is an inherent limit to how big its userbase gets? Does the crypto market for it collapse? Do people lose faith in it? Do they invest their money somewhere else?

Issues

I do think the article lays out some of the issues we’re probably all pretty familiar with

  1. Complexity can kill adoptability. Whether that’s complexity of protocol, or of understanding for the user.
  2. Performance that comes from being able to manage everything yourself. Especially search I think suffers from this.
  3. Entrenchment of current platforms

To that last point–the author seems to think that platforms could be persuaded to adopt open standards, but I think we’re seeing the opposite–open standards being adapted to or defined by the platforms. I also see no real indication of platforms moving away from being hugely centralized, and don’t think there has been movement on this since the author wrote this article in 2019 (which also counts as a caveat on the article itself).

The author thinks that the cost of running Facebook is primarily in moderators–and while that’s probably true I wouldn’t be surprised if LLMs are being used extensively replace this role. So it feels like that argument for a large incumbent switching to open protocols is no longer valid.

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In the last few years there are many software that are trying to push decentralization. For example all the Fediverse, with Mastodon/Peertube/Funkwhale ecc.. These softwares has got ActivityPub protocol integrations. And someone also Feed Rss protocol.

Personally in these months I’m returning to use a lot Rss Feeds.

Mirlo for example is integrating Feed Rss and Activity Pub in its software. I think this is a good news.

I do not know if it is possible to think of other protocols to increase decentralization in the music context, but I think that reasoning about it is necessary.

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FWIW Delta.chat also uses a federated open protocol. You login to delta.chat like an email app, with your email username and passphrase. Your chat messages are sent and received using your email service, and stored in a dedicated email folder.

It’s already a thing. FunkWhale has been using ActivityPub to federate music host since 2018 (anyone from FW in the house?). BandWagon.fm is also building on AP, and I know they’re in the house, eh @bandwagon :slight_smile: Other people here have been discussing the possibility of adapting this to their software and services. Yay!

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I think what you’re seeing is an author with a long history of communicating complicated ideas in a US context, while trying to apply a political economy lens to digital technology. Try reading it again as if you’re channeling the late David Graeber, using the broadest possible definitions for terms of art like “markets” and “competition” and “democracy”.

I mean, your platforms wants to collect money for artists, right? Hopefully a bunch of people who love music have money they want to give them. That puts you in a “market”; a space that contains artist wanting to make a living, people wanting to give artists money, and people running services that try to connect the one with the other.

If artists and the people wanting to pay them have a choice of which service to find each other on, then there is “competition”. As opposed to there being a monopoly platform where everyone is trapped by the networks effects of everyone else being there (eg SoundCloud, BandCamp). Competition is not what corporate platforms do (cutthroat destruction of potential rivals by any means necessary), in fact that’s generally the opposite of competition (“Competition is for losers”, Peter Thiel).

A properly-functioning market is a kind of commons. The problem with markets in 2025 is that the regulation required to makes them function as a commons has been dismantled, by powerful idiots worshipping a fetishised and deified distortion of them ("The Market). As Cory Doctorow explains, without formal regulation (rules made by governments), informal regulation - ie fair competition - breaks down.

That’s true of FarceBook or Amazon. It’s not true of GMail, precisely because email is an open protocol. I have a number of community-hosted email addresses for different purposes. All of them can email people using GMail or Outlook, with little or no disruption. So GMail’s size is not an advantage in a protocol-based market, as it is in zero-sum wars between incompatible silos.

True, but it doesn’t force people to use them. Any computer can be a server, if it’s connected to the net on a consistent IP address. Yes, it requires some money to buy a spare computer for the purpose, and to get a static IP if your net connection doesn’t have one by default (or you can use DDNS which is often free). But any group of people who can afford to rent a space can afford to have their own servers in that space.

Consequently, there’s more server capacity around than anyone knows what to do with. Or they wouldn’t be wasting compute on streaming Hawtua girl, mining crypto, or Training MOLEs (Machine Operated Learning Emulations, or “AI”).

You’re right that some of this stuff hasn’t aged well. But I remember reading the paper at the time, and most of these ideas around building busking-style payments into social networks were still untested. The Platform Co-op Consortium folks were writing serious papers around the same time about using blockchains to run co-ops as DAOs.

I think the broader idea of payments as a protocol still holds. Cash has been such a protocol for centuries, defined in physical form and regulated by agents of government, but still allowing anonymous, permisionless P2P transactions between citizens, for any purpose. Payment as a protocol of some kind seems like the only viable alternative to all payments being controlled by an oligopoly of payment gatekeepers. As WeChat Pay and AliPay already are in China, and we’re at risk of Apple Pay and Goggle Pay becoming the Occidental equivalents.

Tech history nerd note; email was well established as a multi-vendor network before BorgSoft got into the game, and before Goggle even existed, so they were far from first movers in the email hosting game. Despite their disproportionate financial power, they still don’t host all email, and will probably never host a higher proportion that they do now.

In fact, I suspect the common figures bandied about count total email addresses created on corporate email hosts, eg as spamcatchers. Not just those actively used by real people in day-to-day communication. I suspect those figures also underestimate the amount of email exchanged entirely between community-hosted services.

In some cases (Xitter, Reddit), but for better or for worse, there are plenty of counterexamples; Meta’s Threats, WordPress.com, FlipBoard, Ghost.org, Discourse.org, and many more platforms actively working on ActivityPub support.

Of course not. There is zero incentive for existing platforms to get smaller. But look at how desperate the DataFarming ones are to keep people inside them, closing down APIs for third-party apps, etc. Because people are are leaving, in huge numbers, and even more would like to. Again, I suspect the common figures don’t do the real situation justice. They’re presumably based on self-reported data from corporate platforms, who are incentivised to report total account numbers regardless of actual use, and data on niche of federated replacements which is hard to gather and likely under-reported.

They’ll probably try, which will further enshittify the platforms, because Trained MOLEs are, unsurprisingly, pretty useless at moderating context-dependent human interactions. Further encouraging people to leave for greener pastures.

At the point where it becomes undeniable that the network effect of the protocol-based network is growing faster than a legacy platform, it will have an strong incentive to adopt the protocol, in a desperate attempt to stay relevant. Because a shark that isn’t swimming is drowning, and a platform that isn’t growing is shrinking, and add protocol support for a rapidly growing network is an easy way to give the appearance than you’re still growing.

EDIT: A lot of the crypto stuff failed because it was built around common assumptions about how digital payments can work, which are wrong for basic behavioural economics reasons explained back in 2000 by Clay Shirky, in The Case Against Micropayments. Previous waves of of micropayments systems were built as platforms, they failed too. So that stuff is orthogonal to the “protocols not platforms” argument.

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Hello! I’ve tried to catch up on this very long and nuanced thread, so I can add a little to the conversation.

ActivityPub is the way forward. Despite its many, many faults, it is the open protocol that can prevent a single platform from dominating. It also represents a network of people already at critical mass: millions of people ALREADY USE ActivityPub.

But ActivityPub is not enough. We need open software that is BETTER than the corporate alrernatives. “Control over your own stuff” is a nice feature, but is not enough on its own to pull most regular people away from highly polished corporate incumbents.

Bandwagon and Mirlo are working towards this goal. Each is an open server that anyone can run. Mirlo is ahead in online sales; Bandwagon is ahead in ActivityPub connectivity. We’re both closing those gaps to reach an awesome common ground.

For non-developers, moving this effort forward means supporting either or both of these apps. Put your music out there. Tell your friends. At your shows, put up a QR code that links to your online albums. Bring more people into this ecosystem, and be one more piece of the reason people leave behind the old, closed world of centralized corporate tech.

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“force” is a tricky word here, and it’s what I tried to get at in my post. None of this works through putting a gun to your head and “forcing” you to do something. The force here is much more subtle, and it’s the force that comes through power dynamics gained through market capture which you get through large capital investments, that is there even if you have an open protocol.

Sure, you can run your own mail server, but if you want your emails to be delivered and not caught in spam filters, you have to use a particular service that is trustworthy. If you want to compete on UI, you have to have a dedicated team working on it. It’s much easier to just use an e-mail service provided by gmail or protonmail (also VC funded). Why? Because those companies have poured billions into that.

Sure, we can all build out our own servers in our apartments, but because we don’t have the same resources as Amazon, that’s always going to be the hardest choice, even if everything Amazon does uses an open standard (and S3 as a file storage system has become almost an open standard). All of this ultimately also builds on open standards (TCP/IP). In the end, it’s much easier to use something that runs on Amazon then it is to start up your own. Why? Because Amazon has poured billions into that.

No one is being forced to use their services with a gun to their head. The huge amounts of money invested in the products apply force so that that’s what people do. Yes, you’re free to leave, but it’s not the easy choice, and most people have Other Things To Worry About.

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When I think of protocols and free speech, I think of something like Distributed Press making websites available over ipfs:// and hyper:// in addition to http://. They recently made this censorship-resistant donation tool to avoid platform takedowns and payment issues. They link this article about debanking to demonstrate the need for cryptocurrency.

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(sorry about the deleted post folks, for some reason Discourse decided this was a reply to Simon instead of @timglorioso :man_shrugging:)

IIRR they also publish over RSS and ActivityPub, and by now probably ATProto and Nostr. I really like the way this gets us back to the original concept of the web; publish it where you want, and anyone can find it how they want.

I know that protocol implementation is a big job, but I highly recommend that all music hosting platforms make this a medium-to-long term goal. One thing I’d suggest what Jaywink did in Python with the federation module for SocialHome, making it self-contained enough to be reusable by other Python software. And modular enough that any dev using it in their software can add support for this or that protocol as plugins to the module, and make it available to every project using the module.

It demonstrates the usefulness of a vendor-neutral payments protocol. But BlockChains are not the only way to do that, nor necessarily the best, and proposing a payment protocol as the solution to debanking is a classic example of trying to fix a social problem with a technical solution.

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Protocols not platforms It’s certainly worth reading; it’s the foundational text of Bluesky (Dorsey, who was Twitter CEO at the time, initially decided to fund what turned into Bluesky after reading the article, and its author Mike Masnick is now on their board) and Nostr.

Agreed that it very much comes from a “markets FTW” philosophy (Masnick is a libertarian) and glosses over the problems with that approach. Bluesky’s moderation services (aka labelers) are a direct implementation of the “marketplace of filters” described in the article, and as markets go it’s neither free (Bluesky can delete other moderation services) nor fair (everybody using Bluesky’s client has to use Bluesky’s moderation service, and there’s no good mechanism for discovering other moderation services so almost nobody runs them).

Also, it’s very much based in a view of “free speech” that’s much more common in the US than elsewhere. A good example of this is the discussion of how one of the advantages of the approach is that Alex Jones (a fascist conspiracy theorist) can still reach his audience. Is that a good thing? It is if you’re a libertarian!

I also see no real indication of platforms moving away from being hugely centralized, and don’t think there has been movement on this since the author wrote this article in 2019 (which also counts as a caveat on the article itself).

It’s certainly true that existing platforms haven’t moved in that direction at all (with the minor exception of Meta’s handwavy gestures towards Threads Fediverse interoperability, which at least so far have basically been a PR play), but I wouldn’t view that as an indictment of the article. That focus was (IMHO) basically a funding pitch, including the bit about how “Users placed tremendous pressure on platforms to cut him [Alex Jones] off.” And it worked! Dorsey (who has said that he regrets banning fascists and anti-trans bigots from his platform) saw this as a way around the pressures on that platform company CEOs. Which is nonsense of course (Bluesky gets plenty of heat for not banning anti-trans bigots) but it’s exactly the kind of nonsense that would be appealing to Dorsey.

Finally it’s worth highlighting that Masnick’s anti-regulation think tank Copia Institute gets funding from Google and other tech companies. They also do some good work, for example the Moderator Mayhem content moderation game … and Masnick (like many libertarians) is very good on civil liberties in general. Still, they are who they are.

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This is incredible context, thank you!

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I note that none of these highly partisan claims are referenced, and suggest taking them with the proverbial grain of salt.

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Oh come on. It’s a message forum not a research publication in a referreed journal. If somebody doesn’t believe me that Protocols not Platforms talks approvingly about how the architecture still allows Alex Jones to reach his audience it’s easy enough to do a search in the paper for “Alex Jones”. Similarly …

He is who he is. So while it might be interesting to read Protocols not Platforms from a Graeberesque perspective, that’s not what had in mind when writing it.

Still, despite all my issues with the paper there’s no question that there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening in the ATmosphere (the ecosystem around AT Protocol). In general, as I discuss in I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS ARMY, millions of Brazilians, Black Twitter, and sex worker Twitter to the fediverses! (UPDATED), I see AT and ActivityPub as complementary

  • AT is better for creating very large all-public networks, and the flexibility and eas of creation of of feeds is a huge advantage
  • ActivityPub is better for networked smaller communities with scoped visibility (although Blacksky is implementing the equivalent of local-only posts, so that may change)

Blacksky (which I discussed in "Decentralization" and erasure: Blacksky, Bluesky, and the ATmosphere) is a great illustration of how the architecture can be leveraged to create a Black-centric network (even though Bluesky PBC itself is just as anti-Black as Mastodon). Northsky is doing something similar with a 2SLGBTQIA+ focus* . And although these communities are demographically focused, this could work just as well for other kinds of communites; in fact, Rudy Fraser of Blacksky was just posting about that yesterday. So it would certainly be interesting to look at how some of these ideas apply to music-based communities as well.

* Northsky is based in Canada, where the convention is to start the acronym two-spirit – which makes sense because Indigenous people were here first

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Highly partisan claims usually consist of a deceptive framing, built around a core of verifiable facts, which can be pointed to when the framing is challenged.

Highly partisan claim #1. What Masnick actually said was;

“In a protocols-based system, those who have always believed that Jones was not an honest actor would likely have blocked him much earlier, while other interface providers, filter providers, and individuals could make a decision to intervene based on any particularly egregious act. While his strongest supporters would probably never cut him off, his overall reach would be limited. Thus, those who don’t wish to be bothered with his nonsense need not deal with it; those who do wish to see it still have access to it.”

Masnick’s point is that the centralised moderation on recommendation-driven platforms helps grifters like Jones grow his audience. Both because it makes the decision to censor him high stakes, and therefore slow to be made, and because it makes a martyr of him when it happens. Either way, he benefits.

Whereas even though in theory there’s nothing stopping Jones from spinning up an ActivityPub-compatible server, like Orange Stalin did with Lies.Social, I’ve never seen hide nor hair of either of them in the fediverse. Perhaps in part because there’s no recommendation system for grifters like them to game, but also because it’s easy for communities to agree on what they consider grifter bolllox and silence accounts and servers posting it, without having to get agreement at any larger scale.

Again, my problem here is not with the fact that Masnick wrote this paper, nor that it was co-published by Copia and CCIA, but with the framing that Copia Institute is an;

Highly partisan claim #2. Let’s look at two aspects;

  1. The implication is that this paper is making the case against internet regulation in general

It doesn’t take more than a quick skim of the executive summary, and the included infographic, to see that this paper is about as “anti-regulation” as Cory Doctorow’s arguments against link taxes. Masnick is exposing examples of regulatory capture, and the misuse of regulatory power by governments for their own domestic political ends. Leading to an overall failure to effectively regulate tech corporations.

  1. The implication that the CCIA is a lobbying front for tech corporations, and that their co-publication of Masnick’s paper aligns him with that agenda.

I suggest having a read of the references linked on their Wikipedia page, which suggests otherwise. CCIA has existed since the 1970s, and has been fighting tech corporations in defence of the public good for longer than I’ve been alive.

Indeed, but this is not the person he’s being framed him.

I’m not going to waste this community’s attention or my time on engaging any further with this person. But since I’ve come across them before, in the fediverse and on SocialHub, I thought it irresponsible not to warn the community here about their well-established habit of misrepresenting people and organisations who do good work. If what I’ve presented here doesn’t make it clear why this person’s claims need to be taken with a grain of salt, perhaps I’m the one who’s mistaken.

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Protocols not Platforms isn’t just critiquing centralized systems, it’s also proposing an alternative he sees as better. And part of why it’s so interesting is that thanks to Bluesky, we can see how what @simon so accurately describes as the text’s classic free market fundamentalism and equating a private marketplace with democracy actually works out in practice!

For example, talking about the protocols-based approach deals with the Alex Joneses of the world, Masnick also writes:

This would not entirely prevent anyone from using the platform from speaking, but if the more popular interfaces and content moderation filters chose, entirely voluntarily, not to include them, the power and impact of their speech would be more limited.

In practice, though, the most popular interface and the default content moderation filter (both provided by Bluesky and used by 99% oif the people) doesn’t limit the speech of people like Jesse Singal or JD Vance. By contrast, they do limit the speech of people the Turkish government doesn’t like and Palestinians.

So the actually-existing implementation of the architecture Masnick describes in Protocols not Platforms (by the company he’s on the board of) allows hate speech and crack down on dissidents and genocide victims – the same result as Twitter and Facebook.

As for CCIA, on their Washington state lobbying disclosure they describe them as “a trade association representing leading technology companies.” Their members include Amazon, Google, and Meta. Their recent positions include opposing the anti-trust case against Amazon, the proposed remedies in the Google anti-trust case, and applauding Trump’s new FTC commissioner’s attitude to anti-trust regulation. It’s true that they opposed Microsoft’s monopolistic behavior back when they were bankrolled by Sun, Oracle, and a few others who left after they settled for $20 million (half of which directly went to the CCIA CEO – nice work if you can get it!). Still, you might want to take their claims of “fighting tech corporations in defence of the public good” with a grain of salt.

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Coming back to @simon’s reply, I agree with most of the details in this critique. But I think its conclusions heavily underestimate the differences between centralised platforms and protocol-based networks.

Yes, accumulated capital confers disproportionate advantage. But it confers relatively more advantage in a platform vs. platform competition, and relatively less in a service vs. service competition over a common protocol. Quite a bit less. So for example, governments can shift the dial significantly just by mandating interoperation of comparable services over vendor-neutral standards, as the EU are trying to do with the Digital Markets Act. Even before they do anything else to regulate the companies running them.

I think this was the fundamental point of the references to market competition in Mike’s article, and what I was pointing at when I said;

The main advantage of accumulated capital is the ability to grow faster, but greater size does not confer greater network effects on the larger service in a protocol-based network. For example, a well-run service with 5 accounts is no more or less able to send email over SMTP than one with a million accounts, or a billion.

To bring the discussion back to the topic of the forum, BandCamp has a massive advantage over Mirlo or BandWagon not because of being the first mover (it wasn’t, MySpace, AdoptABand and many others came and went before), but because it got ahead in a platform war. If BandCamp had federated over an open protocol from day 1, with services like MagnaTune and Jamendo able to publish music indirectly to audiences browsing BC, and vice-versa with artists on BC using CC licenses, even being the first mover wouldn’t have been that great an advantage.

BC might still have been able to grow faster due to greater VC investment. But that growth wouldn’t come at the expense of its competitors. Because it would increase the network effects of the whole network of services, not just BC itself. The incentive structure is totally different, because instead of being a ‘there can be only one’ war, it’s a game where everyone can do better when everyone does better.

Again, consider the incentive differences between an economy dominated by a duopoly of payment platforms (WeChat Pay vs. AliPay, or Goggle Pay vs. Apple Pay), and a protocol-based payment economy . If a person starts earning money and puts it all into a Goggle Pay account, that adds to the network effects of Goggle Pay, at the expense of the Apple Pay, or any other competing platform trying to break in. But if they decide to pay for things in cash, or by interbank transfer, or over a vendor-neutral network standard, they add value to the whole protocol-based economy, because anyone could receive their payments, regardless of who they bank with.

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I know, I said I wouldn’t, but it’s irresponsible not to call out blatant misinformation when one sees it. Plus this cuts to the heart of the whole platforms vs. protocols topic.

But BlueSky is not a protocol-based network. BS is a service, owned by a one company. So nothing that happens on BS right now is an example of what Masnick talks about in Protocols, not Platforms.

Yes, BS is trying to bootstrap a whole new protocol-based network - sometimes known as the ATmosphere - out of its own vanity protocol. But the BS service itself has only been operating in public since last year. Only then did they start serious work on the finer details of making it practical to run a full service in competition with them, which only started to happen a couple of months ago. So what happens on the ATmosphere right now isn’t yet an example of what Masnick talks about in Protocols, not Platforms either.

But you know what is, and has been for over a decade? The fediverse. Which doesn’t seem to have any of these problems BS and other centralised social platforms have to wrestle with. Even an attempt to smear the fediverse as a haven of CSAM - an existential threat for centralised platforms - failed to achieve much more than encouraging service admins to keep defederating from any service publishing CSAM, and reporting it to the relevant authorities.

This leaves highly partisan claim #3, about CCIA;

The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that the CCIA isn’t run by Mike Masnick, Copia, or TechDirt for that matter, and Copia co-published his report on regulation in 2023, when Biden was still President. If CCIA have flip-flopped on their earlier anti-monopoly position since the election, that’s not something Masnick has control over or responsibility for, and it says nothing whatsoever about him or his opinions.

Have CCIA flipped to supporting tech monopolies? Or are there more complex reasons for their positions on these antitrust cases? Given the grain of salt, I expect a claim like this to be referenced. Otherwise I’ll just assume it’s misleading at best, if not entirely wrong.

Finally, we have highly partisan claim #4;

The framing here is that these companies were the same thing in the late 1990s/ early 2000s as they are now. At that time, Sun were in the process of preparing the first releases of OpenOffice (now LibreOffice), following the example set by NetScape in releasing the source code for what became Mozilla’s browser suite. I don’t know about Oracle, but it seems unlikely they were the software-devouring proprietary megafauna they are now.

That megafauna is in many ways a result of the DotCom bubble, which was also inflating around this time. The crash when the bubble popped had a disproportionate impact on engineer-driven tech companies trying to do the right thing, rather than the most immediately profitable thing. A lot of them got wiped out completely, and most of those that survived got taken over by bean counters. This definitely includes Apple and Google, probably also Sun and Oracle. What those companies were at the time of the BorgSoft antitrust case cannot be understood by looking at what they are now, after waves and waves of extractive “investment” and enshittification.

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I want to apologise to @jdp23 and to this community for the way I’ve engaged with his posts.

The reason for my defensiveness is that we’ve butted heads many times before - in the fediverse and on SocialHub - and I’ve noticed a tendency to shoot the messenger when the message isn’t welcome. But that’s not a good reason for me to do exactly the same thing preemptively - assuming bad faith - and creating tension in a community to which we’re both newcomers.

Mea culpa. My apologies to all.

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