There's a whole thread happening over at Eugen's place re: what even is decentralization maaaan
So the thing is, in practice, AP isn't actually decentralized. What it's done is replace one center with many that are even less scrutable. This is not in any way an improvement.
I used to be a big fan of AP
Not being able to see art anymore on tech dot LGBT due to The Art Instance™️ being run by a tyrant was the first big crack in my liking the AP fediverse. It revealed how centralized it really is. Meanwhile Bluesky builds AT and all the tooling to moot the company and its potential power.
AT still has potential. AP is hard locked to a certain course unless some massive disruption happens internally. Its potential, timeline-wise, was where AT is now, not almost 10 years in. I don't see it happening in a world where it peaked at ~3m and doesn't seem to grow any. The million active users it has are the million it will have for the foreseeable future.