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.

> Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists.

by the good grace of Meta Inc. and nothing else. Your account can get purged because:

- they decide to start purging old content

- they comply with a censorship order from the country you live in (or a country you don't live in)

- the CEO decides they don't like you (though that's really only a current issue on Twitter)

> Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism.

Decentralization is the bedrock of all the _most_ pragmatic internet technologies (DNS, HTTP, Email), centralization is a more recent phenomenon driven by a dozen or so very large companies.

This feels like an argument that stuffing cash under your mattress is better than keeping it in a bank. The number one cause of data loss - by far - is technical incompetence. 99.9% of users do not have the expertise to spin up an AWS instance and maintain it.