The only way it could truly work would be by some kind of bridging. When it doesn't even work out for simple chat services, I doubt it can work out for social network services.

I do remember when IRC split in two (EFNet + IRCNet) - as I've touched on earlier that was the beginning of the end of having one established chat network. People may be of different opinions, but I believe this was the turning point, causing people to choose commercial proprietary "silo" services. We did have real communities on IRC, very little of it is left, today I have at least 5 different chat applications on my telephone just to be able to keep one-to-one-communication with everyone (and I can hardly get in touch with my wife, as she prefers Skype, and I pretty much gave up on Skype at some point after Microsoft took over).

The network effect is truly powerful. If there exists other services out there that is truly better than Steem in all aspects, we should abandon Steem en-masse and opt for the best service out there - but otherwise it's paramount that we stick together.

Came to think of another example, Bitcoin. As for me, that's a failed, derailed project - it failed gaining mass adoption due to the schism between the "big blockers" and "small blockers" (and the capacity problems we faced due to the stalemate).