On interoperability—this is what made the web so big. It didn’t just invent HTML; it embraced email, PDFs, FTP, IRC—systems it didn’t control. Anything useful it could connect to was added to its growth path. Today, you can link to a PDF and it just works—even though the web didn’t create PDF viewers.
When I spoke with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, and mentioned Nostr, his first question was, “What’s Nostr?” After I explained, his response was: “Let’s make my web OS interoperable with it.” That’s already been merged.
In contrast, when I once suggested to fiatjaf that the wider web might want to use Nostr, he replied: “I hope they never use it.”
Interoperability isn’t just about protocols talking to themselves—it’s about acknowledging that other systems exist, and figuring out how to work with them. That’s how the web won.
