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.

I like and use matrix (I'm indeed one of those ideological types), but even their nice webapp is janky in comparison to discord, with fewer features on paper (E2EE is huge, but the median discord user doesn't care). I use it in spite of the jank.

With bluesky on the other hand, there really isn't much jank, certainly not relative to twitter (except right now when it feels like the servers are struggling to scale fast enough...). The average bluesky user doesn't seem to be ideologically motivated (or if they are, their ideology is "I don't like elon musk"). They mostly use bluesky because it works for them, regardless of implementation details.

On the Matrix side: to be clear, Element Web/Desktop isn't a nice new webapp (yet) - it's an 8 year old codebase which is improving slowly but surely (unless we get lucky and can focus on a step change). Element X however is an entirely new mobile app written in Rust + Swift UI / Jetpack Compose, and it has zero jank, and gives an idea of just how good Matrix can be: https://element.io/blog/deep-dive-into-element-x/ etc.

It's fascinating to see how well Bluesky has done with RN + Expo though, and makes me wonder what an equivalent Matrix client would feel like. Unfortunately rnmatrix.com looks to have been stalled since Annie joined Beeper/a8c.