In the Fall of 2022, the word protocol was suddenly everywhere. The proximal cause was obvious: fueled, in part, by the highly visible and fractious change of ownership at Twitter, large numbers of people began heading for the exits.

Most of them, of course, were just looking for alternative products or platforms offering roughly the same user experience as Twitter, just with more allied politics and ownership. Many, for instance, fled to Meta’s hastily cobbled together Threads offering. Others fled to Substack, or LinkedIn. And a great many simply curtailed their participation in public social media, retreating to cozier private enclaves online.

But a significant minority—amounting to perhaps several million—chose to do something much more creative. Instead of looking for yet another flavor of what they were already used to, they went looking for an alternative technology paradigm. And began discovering a curious class of alternatives to Twitter that described themselves as protocols rather than products or platforms.