Protocols, not Platforms.

That's my new chant for the year 2026, and it requires a lot of unpacking.
There are now generations of adultish people who grew up in the world of
platforms.  To them the online experience is (and, as far as they know
has always been) online services provided by companies.

I'm talking about social media platforms (X/Twitter, Facebook, even as far
back as Myspace).  I'm talking about YouTube, owned by Google and with their
centralized, profit-driven, control.

Discord is another one of these things and one that's been in the news lately
seeing a mass exodus due to some shinnanigans going on there.  A lot of
communites there are scrambling to find a new, less evil, platform.

With my tiny, barely audible, voice I am trying to steer some people away from
platforms in general and just inform the younger generations that might not
have been exposed to the "whole of the internet" that IRC is a thing, has been
a thing since before the web was a thing, and maybe you should consider moving
your community off of any company's platforms no matter how reputable they
appear to be today.

The main thing that made Discord better than IRC was it's chat history, but
IRCv3 has been in the works for some time to implement that and although it's
still a work in progress there are some servers and clients now supporting it.

I know all of these things are somewhat niche and tend to only get the more
technically savvy people but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  If a person
is someone who doesn't even own a computer, just an iPhone, and they go around
recording themselves every day doing mundane things trying to earn a living
off of the "likes and subscribes" then ... you know, let them live in the world
of platforms.

I am trying to reach out to people who are a bit more like me, want a real
connection to real communities, and just didn't know that under the platform
plaster was a tangle of wires which, as it turns out, is all you need and the
stuff that's now causing you grief, the stuff that's now spying on you and
reporting your anti-american, antifa, thought crimes to the icetapo was
actually superfluous afterall.

Corps: We never needed you.  You just wrapped up what we already built into
a nice little package and made it easy for the "regulars" to consume but
the underlying communication protocols was all we needed.  You're not our
lords and masters, you're extra and unnecessary.  Now you can fuck off.

When you go to usenet and irc today, in 2026, you're going to see some ugly.
I don't like it but you will.  There will be white supremists.  There will be
pedos, there will be N words and misogyny.  From someone who was exploring
these areas of cyberspace, back when we used words like "cyberspace" I can
atest that these people have always been there but usually they're put in
their place and kept hiding under rocks like magots and vermin should be.

But when you abandon a place it's no surprise when you step into it again and
find it overrun with cockroaches.

It's time for regular people who have the persistance and patience to figure
out how an IRC client works, to bring their Discord communities or their
facebook friends or whathaveyou, and come into IRC or usenet or gopherspace or
whatever and just set up shop.

Knowing that it exists is today's battle, improving it's functionality and
protecting the users from our dictators is tomorrow's.

Protocols, not Platforms.
A platform is an ownable thing: Like a company.
A protocol is an agreement on how to communicate: Like a language.
You can own an IRC server, sure.  But anyone can set up an IRC server and own it
anyone can build an IRC network.
You can't *own* IRC any more than you can *own* Engligh (or any other language).
.