The natural cycle of communication apps is that people use them for a while and then the vendor stops maintaining and people keep using them for a while until something new comes along and then it is too late for the old app. See
If you were born in 2000 you might be excused for realizing that somebody born in the 1970s may have used
Compuserve
The Source
Unafilliated BBSes
Fidonet
Various chat applications for UNIX and VMS
USENET
IRC
CuSeeMe
ICQ
AOL Instant Messenger
MSN Instant Messenger
Facebook Instant Messenger
10+ off-brand MSFT chat applications (When you have so many even Skype and Teams are off brands!)
PalTalk
Tivejo (fork of the above with a user registration system that I wrote)
Go2Meeting
and many other "chat" application. In the last few years Facebook and other big tech companies have been unusually good at slamming the door to competition and perhaps we've seen an influx in "normies" who haven't lived through a normal cycle and who believe it is possible or desirable you're going to stay loyal to a chat application the same way your dad stayed loyal to Old Spice.
It has nothing to do with proprietary vs open source, as open source products (say GNOME) are frequently run by people who couldn't care what the users think. It's got less to do with the profit motive than it has to do with penny pinching, in fact non-profits burn out before for-profits because at lest the for-profits have a motivation structure for people to improve things and non-profits by definition do not.
It's a fair assumption that Bluesky is going to suck in 10 years just as none of the things above had more than 10 years. Bluesky is going to spend a dollar on me and all the other (roughly) 15 M users they have now and there's no reason you shouldn't enjoy it now any more than you should let awareness of your mortality spoil all the joys you could be having right now.
It's an interesting question to what extent an "open" platform can resist this. I like the system of POTS and text messaging which is highly interoperable between carriers but has proven to be co-optable by the likes of Facetime.
In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years. Email is a nominally open protocol but Gmail's dominance makes it not so if you care about getting your mail delivered.
> In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years.
This is an often-repeated myth.
I have a lot of experience with XMPP, and I can tell you that many of today's clients are unrecognisable compared to equivalents 20 years ago.
Then IRCv3 is a thing in multiple IRC clients and networks.
RSS, well, I'm not sure how much evolution is needed there anyhow.
By longevity, the most successful networks have all been open ones. The proprietary ones come and go.
What I have seen with XMPP is major uptake with law enforcement and military. Lots of custom systems there.
RSS is a great protocol to talk about, it's not such a great protocol to use.
Right now my RSS reader subscribes to about 110 feeds for 10 cents a month per feed through Feedburner which does all the crawling for me and just hits a websocket when a new article comes in which posts it to SQS. When I want to add new articles to my database I just suck 'em out.
It's a bargain for feeds like MDPI and arXiv and the Guardian that have many articles per day but I could not afford to subscribe to the 2000+ indie blogs that I'd like to subscribe to and that YOShInOn could easily find articles I find interesting in.
I could write my own RSS crawler and probably will at some point but it is a hassle. I can crawl frequently and make my home internet unusable or I can crawl infrequently and have stale results. Worse yet if a feed changes rapidly I might even miss updates completely.
I can define some loss function that lets me find an optional combination of "doesn't poll too fast" and "isn't too stale" for each feed individually but I expect to experience both the consequences of underpolling and overpolling unless I make a definite decision that I am going to underpoll or overpoll by a few order of magnitude.
There was so much fighting between RSS and ATOM in terms of the exact syntax of the records but none about the problem of polling and polling and polling and polling. Confront Dave Winer with ActivityPub or AT protocol and it is like you are showing somebody a car and they don't want to hear about the engine and the brakes and all that they just want to know where to hitch the horse.
Email is arguable thanks to the dominance of Gmail.
Sure you can set up your own email server but if you are on a cable or DSL network just try connecting to port 25 somewhere. Even if you find a place that doesn't have port 25 blocked you will find deliverability is a problem. You might send an email to one normie and have it get through but try sending mail to 100 normies and you might back 28% or something.
Email clients have a lot of pathology too which I think has to do with the influence of Outlook on the industry.
You don't have to set up your own email server to benefit from the decentralization. I am not using Gmail or any email service from the top companies. I'm using a paid alternative.
