I've been thinking a lot about the modality differences between microblogging and forums, and still working out my thoughts, but I definitely agree that generic solutions end up failing everyone.

I'd like to believe that today's practice isn't yet so cemented that we can't aspire to better. I think there's a lot of interop work even among conceptually aligned projects -- there are a couple of FEPs i haven't digested yet, eg FEP-1b12: Group federation (as well as, I just found, one about URLs)

I think the targets I'm looking for are a unified feed that can fan out to specialized clients for detail, and a system that embraces the power of links with minimal friction. EDIT oh, and maybe something that makes it easier to follow specific people across different modalities without having to rediscover them -- although maybe that's adjacent to the topic of this thread