Protocol Lexicon
A glossary of terms coined or specifically defined within the Protocol Institute corpus — from protocolization and hardness to Kafka protocols, dynamic non-events, and protocol dysphoria.
Protocol Institute
Introduction to the Protocol Reader
This introduction situates the emergence of protocol-based social technologies as a response to Twitter's 2022 ownership change, distinguishing between users seeking alternative platforms and those exploring fundamentally different technological paradigms like the Fediverse, ActivityPub, Bluesky/ATProto, and Farcaster. Rao frames the resulting confusion around what 'protocol' means as the entry point for understanding a significant shift toward decentralized, protocol-oriented alternatives to traditional platform models.
Topics
Related resources
Protocol Reader 2025
The 2025 edition of the Protocol Reader, a curated collection of essays, research, and perspectives on protocols across technology, governance, culture, and society.
Summer of Protocols
Unprotocolized Knowledge (Revised)
This paper examines how knowledge can exist and accumulate outside of formal protocols and institutional structures, arguing that unprotocolized forms of knowledge generation—from amateur scientific dialogues to open-access communities—can rival institutional science in generating attention and insights. The authors use the 2021 arXiv paper 'The Autodidactic Universe' as a case study to explore how decentralized knowledge-sharing networks challenge traditional gatekeeping in academic discourse.
Kara Kittel, Toby Shorin