> If by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally"

Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice. This doesn’t mean that the decentralized nature is just a marketing gimmick.

It’s unsurprising that almost everyone uses the Bluesky app given that A) the infrastructure for hosting your own relay or app view (I can’t remember which) didn’t have a reference implementation until a while after launch, and B) the user base is much less tech-y than what I’ve seen on Mastodon. Most of the user base moved over in the flight from Twitter/X a couple years ago. I think if it had come out at a different time you’d see something which looked a lot more like Mastodon’s large population distribution.

Also, while this doesn't really matter it looks like the number of users on non-Bluesky PDSes is 1.42% of the total, not 0.001%.

> They have designed a protocol that could theoretically be decentralised. Then reality hit, and it was centralised.

Could you explain what you mean by the underlying protocol having become centralized over time? While I can understand arguing about whether or not Bluesky-the-social-network is practically decentralized to the degree of something like Mastodon or that it became more centralized over time, I think arguing that ATproto[1] itself isn’t decentralized would be ludicrous.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239