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B.R.A.N.C.H. Manifesto

The Blue Ribbon is alive again

The Internet was created so that independent systems and people could connect. Communication should not exist only at the discretion of a platform owner, a single operator, or one privileged gateway.

In 1996, the Blue Ribbon became a visible symbol of the defence of civil rights and freedom of expression in the electronic world. B.R.A.N.C.H. carries that idea forward as independent technical work: from a symbol displayed on the Web to an open protocol operating through it.

We believe

  1. People must be able to establish communication without registering with a mandatory central service.
  2. A person's identity must remain portable across servers, relays, platforms, networks, and devices.
  3. Public Internet spaces can serve as interchangeable rendezvous surfaces; none of them should become the authority over identity or communication.
  4. Direct peer-to-peer communication should be preferred whenever the network permits it.
  5. Relays are sometimes technically necessary, but no particular relay should be socially or architecturally privileged.
  6. Anyone must be able to implement a client, publish a board adapter, or run a relay without permission from the original developers.
  7. The disappearance of the original project infrastructure must not destroy the network.
  8. Interoperability is more important than product lock-in.
  9. Security must come from verifiable protocols and keys, not from trust in a carrier.
  10. Freedom of communication does not remove the need for user-controlled consent, anti-spam mechanisms, and protection from abuse.

We are not building

B.R.A.N.C.H. is not another social platform, identity provider, central account database, or mandatory cloud. It does not promise perfect anonymity and it does not pretend that NAT, mobile operating systems, abuse, and offline delivery do not exist.

It instead makes every unavoidable intermediary limited, replaceable, and unable to own the relationship between people.

Continuity

If GitHub disappears, another board can carry the rendezvous event.

If a relay disappears, another relay or a direct connection can carry the session.

If the original client disappears, another compatible implementation can use the protocol.

If the B.R.A.N.C.H. developers disappear, the network must remain possible.

The original Blue Ribbon defended the right to speak on the Internet. B.R.A.N.C.H. defends the ability to establish that communication.