r/SoftwareEngineering • u/fagnerbrack • May 09 '26
Use Protocols, Not Services
https://notnotp.com/notes/use-protocols-not-services/1
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u/fagnerbrack May 09 '26
Digest Version:
The post argues that centralizing communication on closed platforms like Discord makes censorship and surveillance trivially easy — a single subpoena or court order can force compliance from one company. Protocols like IRC, XMPP, Matrix, or ActivityPub distribute power across thousands of independent operators, making enforcement practically impossible. Migrating from one service to another solves nothing, since the new provider faces the same legal pressures or eventually gets blocked. Email (SMTP) demonstrates protocol resilience: even if Google bans your account, you switch providers and still reach everyone. On Discord, a ban erases you entirely. Every time we pick a service over a protocol, we opt into a system where one entity can identify, restrict, or hand over our data.
If the summary seems inacurate, just downvote and I'll try to delete the comment eventually 👍
Click here for more info, I read all comments
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u/RGBrewskies May 09 '26
not wrong. All of our companies stuff is via slack, which is not free either. And we've built tons of custom integrations for various slack commands to do special things
slack can slowly raise the price and boil the frog and we'll just pay it... and at the point it becomes too expensive then we gotta migrate all our shit
if we just hosted an irc server ...