Salon held at Devcon Istanbul 2023, facilitated by Ven Gist. Attendees included writers, creators, developers, and practitioners with backgrounds in independent publishing — brought together to explore what a protocol specifically designed to support decentralized independent publishing would need to look like.
The central question: what would it mean to build publishing infrastructure as an open protocol rather than a platform? Platforms capture distribution — they become the chokepoint between creator and audience, extracting value and imposing terms. A publishing protocol would invert this, providing the coordination infrastructure while leaving ownership, distribution, and relationships in the hands of creators.
Protocol requirements
The conversation surfaced five core requirements for what such a protocol should do:
Format flexibility — Support convenient publishing across a full range of formats: long-form text, zines, books, visual media, and ephemera. No format lock-in. One-click publishing modes for print, epub, markdown to allow maximal interactivity across experiences.
Direct funding distribution — Route funding received directly to individual creators rather than pooling it centrally. The Spotify model — where revenue pools are distributed according to aggregate share of streams — concentrates power and obscures the relationship between audience support and creator income. A publishing protocol should make the link between supporter and creator legible and direct.
Creator-collector relationships — Facilitate genuine ongoing relationships between creators and the people who collect or support their work, rather than mediating or abstracting that relationship away.
Permanent storage — Enable storage on decentralized, permanent infrastructure such as IPFS and Filecoin, so that published work is not subject to platform deprecation, link rot, or unilateral removal.
Non-captive distribution — The protocol should not capture distribution channels. Creators should own their own distribution — the protocol provides the infrastructure for publishing and coordination, not a walled garden that becomes the mandatory intermediary.