@feld @jae That's what we thought with Twitter and Reddit. Then they discontinued the API's. Those are just two recent examples of something that has happened dozens of times in the last 25 years. Slack discontinuing IRC is another. If I depend on an API that could be taken away at any moment, I have nothing. If there are no competing and interoperable implementations of the standard, you're just at the whims of the owner of the one true version.