alt Hacker NewsThat's true if you define the problem as "does my parser crash" and not whether the app is perceived as working correctly. If some platform adds support for video posts, then the next thing that happens is people start making posts that are only video. Meaning that in every other client, users see what appears to be an entirely empty post. Which will be considered a bug.
This is the core argument of Moxie's seminal essay, The Ecosystem Is Moving:
https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
One of the controversial things we did with Signal early on was to build it as an unfederated service. Nothing about any of the protocols we’ve developed requires centralization; it’s entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.
That was written in 2016 but it was true then and continues to be true today. Users reject federated open platforms because the coordination costs mean they don't move as fast as proprietary centralized platforms, and they often appear broken even if technically working as designed.
Nothing about that analysis is unique to social media. It is also true of file formats. OpenOffice never took off because new features got added to Office first, so files that used those features would open in semi-corrupted ways in OpenOffice. The fact that OO represented things internally using open unions didn't matter at all.
Well, this doesn't prevent the "flagship" app from shipping things and doesn't slow it down. So it's at least not slowing down development which is the argument the parent post was making.
I've actually observed the exact opposite thing. Since Bluesky is open source, it's often visible when developers start working on a feature. And they often check in lexicon changes early on. As a result, there's been a few cases where third party client actually added support for these features earlier than the official one since they already knew the shape of the data.
This wouldn't always work, of course. Yes, if you're developing an app or a client, you better keep up with the ecosystem. But the landscape is competitive and there is no cost to switching. So if something falls behind, you can use something else.