Decentralisation is a moving target. You look at the web itself, it started with a protocol (HTTP) and a single client, a browser called "WorldWideWeb", which they renamed Nexus in 1994 to avoid confusion with the broader concept of the World Wide Web. So the first "WorldWideWeb" was basically Chrome. And that means the web at first was totally centralised. Other clients then appeared and evolved, making HTTP more robust (Line Mode, Erwise, Viola, Mosaic...) This idea that HTTP appeared and then the web just sort of "happened" on top of it is widespread but totally false. That's the path ATProtocol has said it wants to go. For that to work the protocol has to get more and more decentralised as time goes by, and that means more and more independent implementations have to appear to take away market share and mind share from the Nexus-like flagship demo. That's how many decentralised protocols have developed. And the opposite is also true, many protocols that started off pretty decentralised have gradually become more centralised over time (which arguably is what's happening vis a vis Nostr relays if you go by nostr.band stats). Time dimension is important.

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Given that you have established that starting decentralized or not is irrelevant, what should we consider when assessing the decentralization status of a thing? Incentives (and possibilities). Any reasonable person can see that Bluesky will remain centralized forever because of identity centralization and data centralization, in fact it cannot be decentralized at all because the identity system is centralized by design (because they wanted to do a blockchain for key rotation but couldn't figure out how). All one can argue after that is that is that "it doesn't matter" because "login is easier". While Nostr has much bigger chance of being decentralized, although it could also fall back into a "de facto Bluesky" mode and have its data all centralized in one place, but that would be a very unlikely hard failure edge case from which it could even recover later if developers wanted.