If people cared about decentralization then we would not have seen the consolidation that we've seen. That's true even for technologies who pitch decentralization as a core feature, as we saw with cryptocurrencies -- the original argument was that cryptocurrencies allowed a decentralization of finance, but then we saw a handful of platforms centralize the trades, and most people who bought cryptocurrencies were pleased to have this convenience.

From moxie.org:

"Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1. To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms. Again. People who will run servers for you, and iterate on the new functionality that emerges. Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan."

They also make this point:

"I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway."

For a variety of reasons, people have not felt that it is worthwhile to fight for decentralization.

People don’t really care about decentralisation.

Bluesky arrived at the right time, unlike Mastodon.

What put me off from mastodon is the fact that you can't migrate your account easily.

Yes, Bluesky is more centralized, but I feel like it is decentralized in the ways that matter for a Twitter/X Alternative use case :

- Self hosting of data, easy migration - Automatic verification via DNS - Custom feeds, Custom moderation, but you can still use the official ones

Just use all of them, don't hold yourself to one system.

We already have a wildly successful open protocol for communication, email. People also want the advantages of centralization.

You don’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy.

This misses the point much like saying people should use Linux because it's open source. Open source is great, but at the end of the day, people will use software that they're both capable of using and that solves their problems. If you don't tick both of those boxes, the rest of it doesn't matter. Social media is the same, owning your data is nice, but if the barrier to both entry and maintenance is too high for a regular user, it's not going to happen.

In theory Bluesky is not centralised. In practice there's only one company operating a relay.

The model of "identity backed by domain ownership" is a nice one, and deals with the Mastodon identity portability issue.

I’m on mastodon but the people I want to follow mostly aren’t :-(

Having looked at a lot of these platforms, only Hive (formerly Steem) operates in a properly decentralized manner.

The first push was to mastodon and it was a disaster that probably saved X and might have contributed to trump winning all because of decentralized’s inherent bad UX.

Something else is at work. We’re teaching the public on how to move platforms. The general public has a serious problem with tech inertia.

We in tech have not even made a 1-click port everything to somewhere else please button (need to build the somewhere else too).

There’s a lot of work to be done.

Twitter/X has shown to be no more than a self-promotion and PR platform as soon as it became popular. Just disposable snippets (pretty much the definition of a 'twit') to drive views. The same will apply to Bluesky. It does not matter whether it is centralized or not, VC money or not, as long as it serves that purpose. In fact a centralized system probably serves this purpose better as it is easier for the users and for content reach.