I guess that’s fair, too. I’m not really into podcasts either, and the ecosystem seems healthy enough. Many FOSS podcast clients use Apple for discovery, which I guess make sense; but there’s probably other databases, and the contents themselves aren’t usually hosted by Apple, just the metadata.

So yeah, podcasts are in good shape. In fact, they are probably the most used decentralized media right now (apart from torrents, maybe). I hope Bluesky gets to that point, and I do wish them luck, but we’ve got to see the incentives are not that well aligned. As for the trademark... it’s surely weird, it’s not the end of the world if they continue to hold it, but setting up a non-profit (not in US, perhaps) for the protocol itself would probably be more appropriate down the road.

The thing with ATProto is, there is little incentive in creating apps that speak the app.bsky vocabulary. If I understand correctly, there is one other full-fledged app that does that, Blacksky [0]. By full-fledged, I mean they host a PDS, a relay, an app view, a moderation service, and a bunch of feeds and other doodads. If Bluesky goes down, Blacksky will probably be fine. They are, however, yet another US company [1], which is not ideal.

[0]: https://docs.blacksky.community/

[1]: https://blackskyweb.xyz/about/support/tos/#:~:text=Blacksky%...