Interoperability is still the future
Apple surprised tech observers last week by announcing that it would support RCS on iPhones starting next year. RCS, which will replace SMS and MMS, enables higher resolution images and other features like read receipts for texts that used to be exclusive to iMessage. Google has long complained that Apple’s lack of support for RCS was the reason for messed up reactions, broken group chats, and of course, green bubbles when messaging between iPhones and Android phones. Many have been confident that Apple would never adopt RCS because iMessage (which only works between Apple devices) is a major selling point for iPhones; this course-reversal might signal that Apple is opening up to interoperability.
Put simply, interoperability is the ability to use two things together—consider how we can choose from an array of tires for our bikes, or different batteries for our smoke detectors, and so on. In the software world, this means the ability to use different programs to access and/or exchange the same data. Interoperability advocates believe software interoperability can free users from the clutches of big tech and empower them to take back control of how they use the internet by tearing down the walls of closed gardens. Imagine how Facebook or Twitter would have less influence in a world where users could access Facebook posts and tweets on other websites.
One of the earliest forms of interoperability was RSS, which made website content ingestible by other applications. This was ideal in a world dominated by personal blogs and news websites which were updated just a few times a day. It’s less useful on the present social-media dominated internet that’s deluged with new content every minute and where curating information is more important than acquiring it. A potential solution is ActivityPub, which allows users to build a feed of posts from any service that supports the ActivityPub protocol.
Like most new protocols, ActivityPub faced initial pushback, but has since become the de-facto standard for Web 2.0 interoperability as it was embraced by decentralization enthusiasts and implemented by Tumblr and WordPress. One of its advantages is that it’s strictly a social networking protocol, which means that any kind of content can be served over ActivityPub. Everyone’s heard of Mastodon, a microblogging site (i.e. a Twitter replacement), but we also have Lemmy, a link aggregator (i.e. a Reddit replacement), and PeerTube for video.
Despite these developments, the interoperable internet is far from realization. Earlier this year, Twitter ended free access to its API and shut down almost every third-party Twitter client. Reddit followed suit months later, sparking backlash from users and moderators. Twitter and Reddit users are now forced to use official apps and websites where they can’t avoid seeing ads and are more easily influenced into purchasing services like X Premium and Reddit Premium. Is interoperability dead?
I don’t think so. Consider how amazing it is that Apple—known for its closely guarded walled-garden—is collaborating with Google on messaging. Facebook’s new microblogging platform Threads is prioritizing ActivityPub implementation and the Fediverse recently reached 1 billion monthly posts. Like scientific revolutions, there are no absolute victories in technological change and the old guard will have to die before the new guard takes over, but we are in a moment where we have a real chance to take the internet back from corporations—and some are already capitulating.
