> And when was this magic period of interop? From about 2002 to whenever Google and Facebook killed XMPP federation. If you were among the computer nerd crowd

> And when was this magic period of interop? From about 2002 to whenever Google and Facebook killed XMPP federation. If you were among the computer nerd crowd you had a blog with an RSS feed rather than a homepage. Your Flickr galleries had RSS feeds. Many sites we'd call "social media" today had some type of feed. If you knew someone's account name on the service you could get a read-only feed of the content they chose to make public. You could "follow" someone by adding those public feeds to your RSS reader. They might even allow pingbacks/trackbacks that let you reply to them on your blog. You could fire up your Jabber supporting IM app and send messages to other Jabber users as well as any Facebook or Google user. The model was very interesting but was not workable for billions of normal people that didn't have blogs or Flickr accounts or whatever. I say these things were only available to computer nerds because to run a blog usually required you be your own sysadmin, moderator, and security. Pingbacks and trackbacks were ruined by spammers as were blog comments. WordPress was hilariously insecure and damn near every blog was hosting at least one piece of malware. Facebook et al worked for "normal" people because Facebook took on the roles of sysadmin, moderator, and security. Most of the services offering composable feeds were either going out of business or shutting down feeds because they realized (like Facebook) that they could monetize access to their users.