Yeah, the linked article did make me smile because the previous iteration of OpenSocial - which had a LOT of buzz around it back in 2007-2010 - was such an ambitious swing that completely missed.

Apparently I wrote about it a fair bit back then, mostly noting how confusing it all was: https://simonwillison.net/tags/opensocial/

This doesn’t similar to atproto, which is what I discuss in the article. “Open social” isn’t an official term btw, I just like it enough to refer to this movement. I think recycling names from dead projects to refer to new concepts is fine. You’re welcome to ignore the article’s title.

Shindig https://shindig.apache.org/ was the reference implementation of this spec. Was pretty novel at the time.

Why disaster? Google used it successfully in their products like Orkut. It was a novel federation protocol at that time.