Reminds me of the various crypto protocols talking about theoretical decentralization while entirely bound to 1 platform with no other useful apps in sight.
It's an early time but https://tangled.org/ (sort of like GitHub) and https://leaflet.pub/ (sort of like Medium) are pretty cool and useful, in my opinion. As it gets easier to start new apps (e.g. with tools like https://slices.network/ that take care of indexing the network) I think we'll see more apps built on AT.
In my article, I tried to explain how that works and what makes it possible. "Making it possible" is usually a prerequisite to the kind of broad adoption you're talking about.
What I agree about 100% is that "normal" users don't care about any of this. They just want good apps. The interesting thing about Bluesky, in my opinion, and what makes it different from crypto in your analogy, is that the vast majority of Bluesky users are "normies" in that sense. They couldn't care less about "decentralization" and some are even actively against the idea. But the decentralized nature doesn't directly "show up" in the product much, just like it doesn't "show up" when you browse the web and hop between servers. I think that's key to adoption--it needs to "just work" behind the scenes.
Many (likely a majority) of crypto users are "normal" in that sense too, they just want to transfer funds and don't care about concepts like decentralization or privacy.
I attended DevCon and few other crypto dev events this year for work, and it was hilarious how few actual products were present.
I hope that AT / Bluesky doesn't fall into this same trap of iterating over the details of a protocol vs shipping apps that people actually want to use.
For me personally a slightly less toxic twitter isn't that app, but when something comes along that is I'll likely setup a domain for AT.
Yeah, that’s a really odd take. Git is completely usable apart from GitHub and I would wager that the majority of Git usage happens without GitHub. I personally have far more personal repos hosted on a NAS than anything in GitHub, and while I did work for one company that used GitHub professionally, I can’t imagine it’s anywhere near ubiquitous. Prior to that I worked at a company with 10s of thousands of internal git repos and before their migration to git used a git front end for perforce. Prior to that (and prior to GitHub), I used a git front end for subversion.
I see GitHub as the successor to SourceForge, not a requirement for using git.
I guess we are just in very different professional circles. I've worked with dozens of teams over the last 10 years or so, and I've never come across anyone that self-hosts a repository. The vast majority use Github, and there's been a couple of Bitbuckets, and a couple of GitLabs. That's it.
Prior to that there were a few Subversions, a Perforce, MS's thing (TFS?).
You'll run into them if you ever work for organizations that have strict IP constraints or have no interest hosting their code on a platform in the US.
Coincidentally I have seen that becoming more and more common in my circles since last November.
In my article, I tried to explain how that works and what makes it possible. "Making it possible" is usually a prerequisite to the kind of broad adoption you're talking about.
What I agree about 100% is that "normal" users don't care about any of this. They just want good apps. The interesting thing about Bluesky, in my opinion, and what makes it different from crypto in your analogy, is that the vast majority of Bluesky users are "normies" in that sense. They couldn't care less about "decentralization" and some are even actively against the idea. But the decentralized nature doesn't directly "show up" in the product much, just like it doesn't "show up" when you browse the web and hop between servers. I think that's key to adoption--it needs to "just work" behind the scenes.