Mirror and Tipping Point to Interoperable Content, Social, and E… — Mirror

As Ben Thompson notes in The Web’s Missing Interoperability, interoperability was actually one of the core benefits mentioned at the start of the last wave of consumer tech, what many refer to as Web2.0. But we didn’t get interoperability from the big Web2 giants of Facebook, Twitter, and the like. We got almost the exact opposite — business models... See more

Interoperability is the idea that to succeed in the future, builders will design individual lego pieces rather than entire sculptures.

Subscribers will be replaced by supporters, angel investors by angel audiences, and collaborators by co-owners.

Interoperability at scale is possible, and it can enable a healthier and more diverse product ecosystem. As As Jarrod Dicker notes, it remains to be seen whether Web2 will still exist in the future as a parallel to Web3. But it’s clear Web3 is coming, and ultimately whether it is a full replacement will come down to what we as creators and consumer... See more

In essence, “interoperable” means multiple products or services can make use of the same information.

The reason I call this Web2.5 is because the Substacks and Patreons are open but not interoperable. There’s nothing stopping me from downloading my Substack subscribers and posts and manually moving to a new platform. The data is accessible but not interoperable, and that makes all the difference when it comes to building the internet of tomorrow.

The key point to take away from this is that owning the content is not important to Mirror’s strategic moat. What differentiates Mirror and makes it a sticky product for creators is that it offers a number of ways to build a business that you can’t get anywhere else. Mirror dramatically lowers the coordination cost of creating a complex online busi... See more