That was my point too, I guess I wasn’t clear enough so thanks for elaborating. The protocol isn’t at fault, but something being a protocol (and not just a proprietary service) isn’t enough if the vast majority of the market share is being held by a few corporations.
Sadly look at email. Technically you can host it yourself but if you’re not one of the 15 or so big providers, good luck not being marked as spam before you even do anything.
The real problem is with the oligarchy controlling everything, service or protocol. This is why Threads was/is dangerous.
Not even necessarily end-to-end, just encryption. And possibly encapsulation within an already allowed protocol, like it’s extremely common with HTTP these days.