Use Protocols, Not Services

Source: Hacker News

The Internet is almost anonymous and privacy‑preserving by design. Unless an administrator actively tries to track you, there is no built‑in identity layer. What breaks both properties is the centralization of communication onto closed platforms, where identification becomes possible either by the hosting company itself or by governments compelling them to cooperate.

After recent events, it is time for us to start using protocols again instead of services.

Services are easy targets

A government that wants to identify users, censor content, or enforce compliance only needs to send one letter to one company. One subpoena, one court order, one regulatory demand: the service likely complies or faces fines, lawsuits, or bans.

This is happening right now. Governments worldwide are passing laws that require platforms to verify the age of their users. Discord is voluntarily rolling out mandatory “teen‑by‑default” settings until proof of majority (by submitting a face scan or, God forbid, a government‑issued ID), likely anticipating future regulatory obligations.

None of this could happen with a protocol. You cannot require age verification on IRC, XMPP, ActivityPub, Nostr, or Matrix, because there is no single entity to compel. Each server operator makes their own decisions. A government would need to individually pressure thousands of independent operators across dozens of jurisdictions, which is a legislative and enforcement impossibility. Even if one server complied, users would simply move to another.

Switching services solves nothing

After Discord’s announcement, the instinct is to migrate to another service. This is pointless. The new service will either operate under the same jurisdiction and face the same rules, or it will be offshore and eventually blocked or pressured once it becomes large enough to matter. You are just moving from one regulable entity to another.

The actual solution is to stop depending on a specific commercial service and start using a protocol. This is not a radical idea—we already do it with email. SMTP is a protocol. You can switch providers, self‑host, or use any combination.

Email may not seem to be the best example since it has become an oligopoly where Google, Microsoft, and maybe also Apple control the vast majority of the email infrastructure. But this actually shows how protocols are resilient. If Google bans your account, you can move to another provider and still reach every Gmail user. In a more extreme scenario, even if Google and Microsoft discontinued their service in your region and blocked inbound messages from you, SMTP implementations still exist and work in a very degraded mode. You’d need to migrate (and adjust some connections), but there is absolutely no need to reimplement anything. That is the difference with a service like Discord.

On a centralized service, if your account is deleted or banned, you are gone for good.

Use protocols. Every time we choose a service over a protocol, we opt into a system where a single company can be compelled to identify us, restrict us, or hand over our data to their profit or our government’s advantage.