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Comment by roguecoder | Hacker News Reader

The main reason for that is because they have been allowed to build a walled garden. Interoperable protocols would allow other companies to innovate on an equal playing field. Indeed if we follow the Bell example, the networked platform could be forced to be separate from those who profit off of it.

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Can you name some successful interoperable protocols used by social networks that allow for meaningful innovation and updates? All I can think of is Agora* (which no one uses) and IRC (which hasn't added nontrivial features in a very, very long time).

Whatever protocol (Ostatus?) connects my write.as account with my mastodon account and everyone else seems to be enabling meaningful innovation now.

And between your examples there's also XMPP.

It's ActivityPub, not OStatus!

Whatever protocol Facebook is using internally to interoperate between their thousands of servers, with some additional authentication and authorization layers put in?

I mean, not sure how sensible that would really be, but I think it's worth considering that Facebook is not some PHP script with a small local MySQL database behind it either, but rather a massive distributed system in itself, even if under the administrative control of a single entity.

One would assume that Facebook's internal protocols are constantly upgraded to enable new features and those upgrades would be much slower if industry politics got in the way.

Yes, Matrix <https://matrix.org>.

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