Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Bluesky app view is centralized in that it can decide which content to show, but A) the hosting of that content is decentralized, and B) alternate app views like Blacksky exist which are fully independent of Bluesky (both Bluesky the company and Bluesky the app view). The Bluesky app view could stop showing users content from Blacksky (or any other) PDSes, but that's it. If you're using the Blacksky app view, afa…
If by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally" They have designed a protocol that could theoretically be decentralised. Then reality hit, and it was centralised.
Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice. This doesn’t mean that the decentralized nature is just a marketing gimmick.
It’s unsurprising that almost everyone uses the Bluesky app given that A) the infrastructure for hosting your own relay or app view (I can’t remember which) didn’t have a reference implementation until a while after launch, and B) the user base is much less tech-y than what I’ve seen on Mastodon. Most of the user base moved over in the flight from Twitter/X a couple years ago. I think if it had come out at a different time you’d see something which looked a lot more like Mastodon’s large population distribution.
Also, while this doesn't really matter it looks like the number of users on non-Bluesky PDSes is 1.42% of the total, not 0.001%.
> They have designed a protocol that could theoretically be decentralised. Then reality hit, and it was centralised.
Could you explain what you mean by the underlying protocol having become centralized over time? While I can understand arguing about whether or not Bluesky-the-social-network is practically decentralized to the degree of something like Mastodon or that it became more centralized over time, I think arguing that ATproto[1] itself isn’t decentralized would be ludicrous.