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@okaylub @liaizon @Bike right, I would say the difference is not necessarily that significant when the Threads userbase is like 50x and the X userbase also remains at that level.
Mastodon also got its mainstream moment a bit earlier and that faded. It is possible it is just a temporary thing for BSky also, the overall direction has certainly been back out from any mainstream relevance so far for it too.
@liaizon @rosano just to give some examples of the issues end users face even on ATproto when there's decentralization:
- where should I register is still a source of confusion
- you will still run into https://bsky.app/ links that you need to figure out can be accessed through your own app whatever that may be
- your provider going down will still cause you to lose your data unless you've been making backups
The more complex architecture adds even more potential sources of confusion IMO
@liaizon if you're just referring to there finally being at least one example of all the pieces of the puzzle being run third-party (or close to that) etc. like @rosano seems to be suggesting I think these are still baby steps especially if we are talking about regular people actively using and understanding in significant numbers.
@rosano @douginamug @liaizon whether or not the protocol allows for federation they're basically just a centralized platform though. That has let them avoid much of the confusion people have with federation but if they were to ever fulfill the promise of being decentralized they'de have to tackle that issue just like fediverse platforms have to.
@stefan @liaizon that said I wish Mastodon tried to work a bit more like an project that puts the open source development process first, seems like the team is pretty secretive about how and what they work on except for the very high level overview. I doubt it is a very good recipe for attracting outside devs.
@stefan @liaizon things that may be in the way of that are:
1. fully independent communities don't seem to come cheap with ATproto
2. there's almost no effort to get people to anything else besides the corporate servers so the alternate infrastructure is unlikely to be at a scale that would support any significant migrations at that point
@liaizon @Bike seems like the "mainstream" is still very much TBD. In the big picture it has almost no adoption, is losing active users by the day and all the supposed other applications for ATproto are virtually unused currently.
5 million MAU really isn't much and the startup is also probably going to have to find more funding soon.
Of course it's possible that all the excitement leads to newly found success but it doesn't seem like there's anything suggesting that is an inevitability.
