ATProto and its advocates increasingly sound like all the crypto-based decentralized platforms that failed. The difference is that crypto people actually had reasons to run nodes, they got paid to, while ATProto expects enthusiasts to do so for the love of the game or act like bluesky and have 99% of the "decentralized" platform on a centralized node.

It never catches on with application developers because it requires you to already worship the protocol and build around it.