except that every single protocol bridge eventually succumbs to the same fate: one side of the bridge decides it needs to control its userbase, so it shuts off the bridge to induce people to make a new account in their tool, instead of remaining interoperable.

the only defense against this is to use protocols with robust ecosystems and lots of implementations, sufficient to ensure no single group can drive it into the ground. this is why email, irc, and (we hope) mastodon survive while all the bridges into slack, matrix, facebook messenger, google talk, etc have all disappeared or are at siginificant risk.

I will not take bluesky's protocol seriously until there is a demonstrable network of independent federated instances for this reason.

CC: @pluralistic