… until that one bridging server goes down, and then they can’t. And only after a fiddly permission dance, thanks to the Gated Community brigade.
The fediverse.party team talked this over recently, and agreed that we still don’t include bridged accounts in our definition of “the fediverse”. For the same reason nobody ever thought of Titter accounts as part of the fediverse. Despite the the fact there were once far more bridges to that (crossposting servers etc) than there are to BS.
You just presented the strongest argument I’ve seen for including BS accounts (do you include Nostr acounts for the same reason?). I’ll reopen our issue discussion and link to your comments, to make sure we consider it. But I’m still not convinced.
To be clear, I very much want BS and Nostr accounts to be part of the fediverse, whether that’s using AP or a successor. Just as I very much wanted the OStatus fediverse, the Diaspora Federation and the Zot-iverse to be unified, which AP has mostly achieved.
This was due in no small part to your efforts, both technical and organisational. Which is why I said in my unromantic history of AP post …
Also why my opinion of the SWF went from sceptical to optimistic as soon as I saw you were involved.
No analogy bears close examination, but see above. The issue is simply this; does it federate directly with (at least some fediverse servers), or does it depend on indirect bridging that might not always be there?
I’m itching to question some of your factual claims about internet protocols. Because AFAIK everything you mention sits on top of an IP connection, which is what allows it to be part of the rest of the internet. So the equivalent in the fediverse is subnetworks using different clusters of FEPs, on top of a minimal AP connection that puts them all in the same network.