Tent is at least equally proven. I'm following 157 people (maybe ~50 are consistently active users). Within only a few months of existence, Tent has attracted development of an Android app[1], two iOS apps in beta[2], a very smooth and sleek OS X app[3], and several alternative webapps[4], all made by third-party developers with no relation to the startup that created the Tent protocol.

I don't mean to be rude or dismissive towards another open-social project, but I have been unimpressed with the design and usability of Identi.ca. OStatus seems to be the work of idealistic folks who hoped they could just make an open protocol and people would flock to it, solely because it was open. Predictably, that hasn't happened. Open is great, but software also needs to provide a great user experience. I think the Tent community gets this.

Tent is also more than a Twitter clone. It already supports private posts, long-form blogging and social bookmarking, unlike OStatus, and in the months ahead it will do much more.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monstarlab...

[2] http://signup.tentrapp.com/ and http://bivy.me/

[3] http://jabs.nu/Tentia/

[4] http://zelten.cc/, http://essayist.mndj.me/

I'm not quite sure what the advantages are between one protocol or another, but I'm also not sure why there have to be two camps of development when one standard can be hashed out.

I do know that the status quo of having a single private company dominating the space is not ideal and would love to see any alternatives take root.

I should have put this in my last post: “Why not OStatus”, from the Tent authors themselves: https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/4

The tl;dr is that Tent is much broader in scope than OStatus while being, at its core, simpler.