Maybe Bluesky has "won"

Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism. In theory, I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn. I haven't had a portfolio in years, because I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it. Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists. (And plenty of precious content that ended up on other services, like Qik, no longer does.)

If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.

The Linux chat rooms are on Matrix because highly ideological people are active in Linux communities, but everyone else just uses Discord. And even Matrix has a webapp that makes it almost as easy as Discord.

>If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.

Good! Higher barrier to entry is exactly why Neocities, Mastodon and [redacted] are so much higher quality than the NPC internet. We need a couple hurdles to keep out the low effort posters.

Last time I checked that’s called gatekeeping.

Neocities is a ton easier to try for “non-engineers”- it even has a discovery feed and a WYSIWYG editor…

Yeah but is it good gatekeeping or bad gatekeeping? Because having to agree to a code of conduct is a gate, but I don't think we want to remove that one. And anyway, when did gatekeeping pick up such a negative, pejorative tone? The gatekeeper is the one who kept people out of the gate. Some people were kept out for good reasons, others were kept out for bad reasons. Depending on the gate and country politics, nobody or everybody was let in through the gate. That doesn't make gatekeeping inherently bad. Doctors gatekeep who can call themselves a doctor, and while there are broader problems with that, fundamentally, some random fraudster shouldn't be able to call themselves a doctor sell rat poison in a pretty box as cure for cancer. There are some kinds of gatekeeping that are bad, but it's not inherently so.