Google Reader feels like an ominous pick for an analogy. Sure, RSS survived the Google Reader shutdown, but not all the communities that used RSS (many that still don't know what RSS is) survived.

It feels almost "Freudian" to claim a thing is decentralized and then by analogy keep pointing to a massive (social) centralization of a decentralized ecosystem as a good thing. But especially one that we already know the ending for. Google Reader united a lot of RSS houses, value added a social graph and social commentary between them, and then at the whims of executives Google Reader fell and nearly killed RSS, but certainly destroyed an impressive social graph.

As an analogy that doesn't give me a lot of confidence in ATProto.

Ominous, but accurate. Imagine RSS but you couldn't use a desktop or mobile RSS reader, but only Google Reader or a comparably scaled clone.

In exchange we have many excellent RSS Reader. Just as recently someone talked about NetNewsWire.