Personally, I think its great to think about protocols and the tech that goes into it... but only because its interesting to me technically. Some of this kind

Personally, I think its great to think about protocols and the tech that goes into it... but only because its interesting to me technically. Some of this kind of sounds like: I have a cool protocol and now Im in search of a problem that I can apply it to. What app should I duplicate first? You need to flip this around and ask: what kind of service can I build that would deliver new or additional value to users, that is a significant enough improvement that users will switch en mass. Then go do that, get a bunch of users, and then release your protocol and encourage others to participate. There's nothing wrong with doing it all in parallel, but the primary problem -- getting users -- is large enough to consume all of your energy. EDIT: Or become a protocol evangelist... write your protocol, document it well, and start advocating it and explaining the advantages... maybe you can get Lemmy and other platforms to adopt it instead of ActivityPub. You can also write up patches to add support for it to various open source projects. Let them worry about building the remaining parts of solving the social problem... there's definitely room for multiple groups to work on solving this problem together.