If your idea of a federated Twitter is a bunch of mini-Twitters that sometimes exchange indirect replies or something, then the Fediverse fulfills that purpose completely. Mission accomplished, we can all go home now.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time, even the thing Mastodon merged half a year ago that supposedly fetches all replies if you remember to navigate to the topmost post, and wait up to 15 minutes for your view of the thread to coalesce, falls short.
And this is why hosting Mastodon is cheap, it fundamentally cannot provide the functionality BlueSky offers. Of course, you might think that such functionality is not desirable anyway, and that’s entirely fair. But if you’re looking for the immediacy that centralized Twitter gave users, I don’t see a way for Fedi to ever provide that, whereas there is a path to BlueSky decentralization. It’s a fact that your UX is diminished if all of your followers and followeds are not on the same instance.
But in the end, I think there is space for both.
You’re saying one VM was cloned from the other. I could imagine a DHCP client saving leases to disk (they can have pretty long validity periods), and if the box was assigned the .106 address at any point and then cloned, the cloned machine would probably try to take that address, in other words ARP the address to determine if it’s taken, and if so, fall back to some other thing. I would have expected an APIPA address but 172.x.y.z is not out of the question depending on config.
Also, if your bridge has an interface connected to e.g. another ISP-provided router then it would expose any DHCP server running behind that interface to your VMs, creating a race.