Twitter is uniquely poised to lead on interoperability and federation; though they are very large, they are dwarfed by their major competitors, Facebook and Wechat. What's more, Twitter was initially built for federation, with wide, generous APIs that facilitated interop.
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Over the years, Twitter has grown progressively more closed and also more fraught, as the problems of harassment, brigading, and hate speech have dogged the daily operations of the service, rising to the level of a global geopolitical crisis at times.
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Facebook and Wechat maintain the pretense that this could all be solved if governments would just tell them what rules to enforce and then they'd use machine learning and boiler-rooms full of traumatized moderation subcontractors to make it so.
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Of course, this is bullshit: it only works if you don't care how much "good" speech you catch in your moderation regime; to say nothing of the impossibility of reconciling the mores and laws of 150+ countries.
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Beyond that, a regulation requiring filters and mass-scale human moderation constitutes a powerful moat around your business - a capex requirement that new entrants can't satisfy, which safeguards these champions of "disruption" from being disrupted themselves.
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They do fear it. Look at Zuck's testimony and the accompanying docs from last week's Congressional hearings: virtually everything Zuck does is oriented around preserving his advantage against potential future Zucks, sitting in their own dorm rooms, plotting a Myspace rout.
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All of this means that Twitter - and Twitter alone, really - is set up to champion interop, as a way to reconcile its desire to be large and unmoderated with the pressure to do something about disinfo, harassment, and enabling dictators.
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Letting small companies federate with Twitter will cost the company some of the rents it could extract through perfect control - but in return, the company could devolve moderation onto user communities.
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You - or a co-op, or a for-profit, or some other institution - could run a Nazi-free Twitter and only federate with other no-Nazi instances - something you can already do with Mastodon, but federation gives you the benefit of Twitter's scale.
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In fact, this is what Mastodon and other #fediverse technologies are lacking: a way for people to leave Twitter without leaving their communities. Federation lets you have one foot in both worlds.
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We undertheorize interop in these discussions because the web has made it so ubiquitous as to be invisible: imagine how Twitter would be if you couldn't include links to the web, or if you couldn't use some browsers with it, or if it didn't run on one of the mobile OSes.
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All of this to say: I am incredibly excited to read @Jack's update on the Twitter interop project - to see that he views federation as a way to break the walled gardens and resolve demands to moderate at scale.
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The @bluesky team is small, but it's a beachhead: Twitter is the only company that's large enough to make this happen but threatened enough to WANT to make it happen.
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