@mmasnick I'm bridged, and even following your Bluesky account from here (thank you)! But the number of Bluesky users I can follow is miniscule. Asking people to follow a bridging account so I can follow them is hardly seamless. I have a similar frustration with Threads: having to contact friends and ask them to enable federation before I can follow them. I'm not sure what we do about the upset users you refer to, but siloes are currently trumping user experience across multiple platforms.