I think one causal factor for the faltering of interoperable social media infrastructure is the multi-billion dollar public valuations the big players endure. Yes, endure; Because with those valuations and public monies come a huge raft of onerous duties that tend to obfuscate and trump any altruistic intent of interoperability.

But I also see a different sort of emerging interoperability, it just doesn’t feel similar to our legacy syndication services of yore; you know, from seven or eight years ago. The modern web-API ecosystem is incredibly rich and despite being largely proprietary most are vastly more feature rich than those of the past. With new standards organizations like the OpenAPI Initiative and json:api we’re entering an age of immense opportunity, maybe communication, and probably chaos.