Half an hour ago a Chrome extension we depend on for cross-platform posting stopped responding. Instagram publishes started returning empty. TikTok stopped. X stopped. Six platforms in one workflow and five of them went dark inside the same minute. The sixth platform was Bluesky. Bluesky kept publishing. It kept publishing because the path to it does not go through a browser at all. It goes straight at the AT Protocol over HTTPS, with an app password and a JSON body, the way you would call any other JSON API. The decision to do it that way was made months ago and at the time it felt like extra work. Today it is the only thing keeping our content pipeline alive while the bridge is being repaired. This post is about that decision and what it cost us when we made it, what it saves us when the bridge breaks, and how to think about the same tradeoff if you are building anything that has to talk to multiple social platforms at once.…