Interested in the intersections between policy, law and technology. Programmer, lawyer, civil servant, orthodox Marxist. Blind.
Interesado en la intersección entre la política, el derecho y la tecnología. Programador, abogado, funcionario, marxista ortodoxo. Ciego.
IMO bridging or translation isn’t federation per se. Also it seems unlikely that protocols would converge to that extent. In fact AP implementations are already different enough that even within the same protocol it’s hard to represent all the different activities instances can present.
I wouldn’t really count Mastodon/Bluesky bridging as federation. They’re incompatible protocols that were never intended to work together (arguably Bluesky was explicitly designed to avoid using AP).
I can think of alternatives. For example, the server could keep the user’s private key, encrypted with a passphrase that the user must have. So key loss wouldn’t be an issue. (Yes, passphrase loss might, but there are lots of ways to keep those safely already, compared to key material which is difficult to handle.)
Definitely, AP is not magic. But if even within one protocol round-tripping and full-fidelity is impossible or very difficult, that makes it only harder and less likely through a bridge.