The "distributed" part is still to pinned down anyway (which architecture scales and which not, under what definition of "scaling"). The discussions between activitypub and atproto protocol folks are informative in this respect.

But there is another non-trivial difference: these are open source projects.

The real Achilles heel is having a viable business model. But all business models, whether good or bad are inventions. Unless we think predatory adtech is the end of human ingenuity people will come up with ways.

> The real Achilles heel is having a viable business model.

Other activitypub projects are going well with a small minority of people donating the server costs, and project leaders just keeping those servers there because they want it.

I’m working on it.. to me distributed or decentralized or anything tech-y doesn’t matter. What matters is the masses, the common man and at the end of the day, the masses don’t care or know about that stuff. They want to be entertained and maybe they even want to help. Create simple but powerful user experiences. Make them addictive and productive and then you have something that can actually help society