Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

There are many projects that have created protocols for decentralizing discourse, including ActivityPub and SSB for social, Matrix and IRC for chat, and RSS for blogging. While each of these are successful in their own right, none of them fully met the goals we had for a network that enables global long-term public conversations at scale. 

This essay proposes to sidestep the issue by separating social media itself — the act of citizens forming communities to share ideas — from social media companies, by allowing a common interoperable standard in which messages generated on one app could be transported and read in any other application, therefore breaking the monopoly on social media... See more