> "An open protocol with a chance of working"

One of the most depressing things about the decentralised protocol space is the adversarial attitude to other projects - whether that's Nostr v. ActivityPub v. ATproto v Nostr, XMPP v. Matrix v. IRCv3 v. Deltachat, etc.

Imagine if the energy spent on positioning yourself relative to other open-source projects (who should be fellow travellers, if anything) was instead invested into competing with the centralised proprietary incumbents instead.

The same applies to open source as a whole, but it's depressing to see the same vibes leach into the literal tagline of the project.

Doesn't help that all of the major decentralized protocols have been very effectively undermined and pushed aside.

GTalk first de-federated (weakening XMPP as a whole), then killed XMPP support completely. Reader effectively killed RSS for casual users. Email has been swallowed whole by the oligopoly of GMail+Yahoo+Outlook+iCloud+etc; spam is a real problem, so if you're self-hosting your email, you kinda expect to be blocked by default by the large networks.

Existing, corporate-backed efforts are "open-washing" their services.

Signal is supposed to be using an open protocol, but IIRC won't even let you join their network if you use an alt client.

Following Twitter's demise, Bluesky popped up, and promised federation. I didn't check in a while - did it happen yet?

Actually open networks? Mastodon took off like crazy, but everyone tried to register on the "main", biggest instance - we got bamboozled so hard, we can't even comprehend what "decentralized" is actually supposed to mean.

ActivityPub as a protocol? Ted Unangst decided to build his own client from the spec, and was constantly running into Mastodonisms. <https://flak.tedunangst.com/search?q=activitypub>

Matrix? It has effectively one client (Element) that isn't a security disaster. <https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...>

Anything left, worth of anyone's attention?