from summer of protocols application: Plaintext Transfer Protocol (PTTP) towards a universal natural language api protocol
How might someone non-technical start experimenting with a protocol of their own invention? PTTP aims to facilitate immediate playing with emergent protocols by people in the existing apps they use.
On the internet, social protocols rapidly emerge and die in a vicious evolutionary cycle through people’s digital output. Every digital media object is infused with memetic potential for the invention of new protocol containers, from the structure of a meme for conveying dense amounts of information, to coded language to escape censorship (Chinese citizen net language), to sharing your life story in the comments section (the internet checkpoint). Each of these emergent behaviors and patterns could be distilled into a formal protocol with associated rules for sharing and dictionaries of meanings (and similar phenomena have seen standalone social apps created to capture them).
These emergent protocols are stuck in their silos because their data is inherently incompatible with the technological medium that conducts them. Programs follow formal syntax and strict format, while human language is not naively interpretable by machines. Even once translated, this data is stuck in siloed apps, leaving no path to using protocols that are not dictated by the host platform. Although new data protocols (Solid, Ceramic, and new chains) point towards a new future where all app data is interoperable, they require you to abandon the old world of apps where everyone already is for the new.
What kind of environment would allow these emergent protocols to be cultivated in-place rather than stuck in their endless cycle of evolution or forced into an entirely new, separate world?
I’ll start by developing a foundation for “emergent protocol-ness” by studying how people naturally begin using forgiving protocols through their communication on the Internet. Whether designating action items to finish with a preceding “TODO” text, timestamping each bullet list item with the date, or “@ing” people, people are constantly creating new ways of patterning that are relatively legible to others. What happens when these syntaxes, created by different people, collide and how is resolution handled between these budding structures?
With a foundation to these questions, I’ll explore a speculative open-source specification of this plain-text transfer protocol (PTTP), aiming towards an answer to Robin Sloan’s provocation of “the totally sci-fi vision of computers just TALKING to each other.” Can a plaintext data format, with the help of LLMs, enable a universal protocol for interoperability between apps?
Lastly, I’ll prototype a sample implementation of this protocol, aiming towards an environment where anyone could invent their own social protocols (like spring ‘83 and open stories) and immediately start playing with them in existing apps (e.g. a social protocol around sharing descriptions of the sunrise could semi-automatically syndicate what someone journals in their morning page to a compatible client).
During SOP specifically, I plan to conduct research for “emergent protocol-ness” and publish a public essay on my findings, which offers an answer to “what makes for an ecosystem for protocols, one in which new protocols flourish?” In addition, I plan to release a draft specification for PTTP and an accompanying prototype implementation to automatically convert data between two different systems that are not currently interoperable. Finally, I’ll map out and speculate on what infrastructure would be required to allow people to start immediately testing new protocols in the context of their existing apps, with the goal of the release of a speculative essay and toolkit for normalizing this consideration.**