The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols | Summer of Protocols

Protocol Reader - Summer of Protocols

The Protocol Reader The Protocol Reader is an 358-page book (currently only available as an epub) comprising 26 foundational essays by 31 authors from the Summer of Protocols program, carefully edited and sequenced to introduce you to the fascinating new discipline of Protocol Studies. It can serve as

Dangerous Protocols - Summer of Protocols

Protocols are frequently touted as the liberating alternative to walled technological gardens, but the historical purpose of protocols has always been to simplify decision-making and reduce human agency. How do we reconcile these two narratives? I explore the dangerous side of protocols, and how their ability to drive coordination means they also have

Theorizing Protocolization II: Atomic Protocol Questions

Solving real coordination problems to discover the formal laws of protocols.

The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols Web

The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols Venkatesh Rao, Tim Beiko, Danny Ryan, Josh Stark, Trent Van Epps, and Bastian Aue 1. Introduction Complex coordination problems have an air of doomed intractability about them. We speak in fatalistic terms of economics being a “dismal” science, of sociological phenomena being dominated by the

Strangeness, illegibility, hardness

An update from our Protocol Fiction special interest group

Willow - Protocols for an uncertain future (FOSDEM'26)

Centralised systems were designed with the best of intentions, but were turned against us anyway. And peer-to-peer systems will be exactly the same. How do we make the next generation of protocols ...

Decentralization Trade Offs in AT Protocol and ActivityPub DWeb Camp 2026

Christine Lemmer Webber is lead author and co-editor of the W3C ActivityPub specification. Daniel Holmgren is Head of Protocol at Bluesky, working on the AT Protocol specification at the IETF. Join us for a discussion on decentralization trade-offs and other design decisions in the two protocols, and what that means for different architectures, structures, and even future points of convergence. Moderated by Boris Mann

Introducing the Protocol Institute

Building a field and community to steward the planetary-scale process of protocolization

In Search of Hardness

Protocol studies, the next crypto cycle, and the next age of the world

How can open social protocols fail us in 2025 | shazow.net

Let’s compare the possible failure modes of various open social protocols: ActivityPub/Mastodon ATProto/Bluesky Farcaster/Warpcast Some scenarios I’d like to …

Protocol Reader - Summer of Protocols

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

Protocols for Publishers Showcase · Luma

Protocols for Publishers is an event and workshop series that brings together publishers, developers, and researchers to explore open protocols for a…

AT Protocol - AT Protocol

Specification for the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol)

FOSDEM 2026 - Willow - Protocols for an uncertain future

Centralised systems were designed with the best of intentions, but were turned against us anyway. And peer-to-peer systems will be exactly the same.