It's kind of not. It does appear to be at least theoretically possible to self-host any or all of the major components. Unlike ActivityPub projects, however, it doesn't seem like anybody is doing that and offering services to the public.
I don't think that's necessarily true. What I do think is true is that there's a chance some AI thing will be a trillion dollar investment, and the most motivating thing for VCs is fear of missing out on a giant score.
A nonprofit open source profit ought to have different motivations though.
That's pretty much what I wrote in the comment box. The options for the multiple choice questions don't really acknowledge that as a preference people might have.
Yes. I use it to post pictures of birds.
Discovery built into Mastodon and ActivityPub microblogging in general isn't great (and some people claim that's a good thing). One place to look for people to follow is https://fedi.directory/
It's absolutely an issue for hobby level open source projects.
It looks like you have to have a paid Apple developer account to do it.
Probably some actual racists and a whole bunch of people who thought it would be funny to embarrass Microsoft by getting it to say the most offensive thing they could imagine.
That's interesting. This post had suggested it isn't yet possible to host an AppView. It seems the reality is more complex.
Whether it soon becomes possible to self host an AppView, the one remaining centralized component will tell us a lot about where it's headed.
ATProto is almost there with the only missing piece being the AppView. I'm not sure if BlueSky is hesitant about releasing theirs as open source, but I don't think there are any barriers to a third party implementing one.
Apple does have an email service, but I think "Apple Mail" is the name is the client, not the service.
Search and discovery are a big deal. It's much less effort to find people and content, and to be found on Bluesky than on Mastodon/ActivityPub. It takes work on Mastodon, and I don't think Pleroma, Misskey, and their forks are doing much better (though I believe Akkoma has a decent search function).
This is, in part because there is a very vocal contingent of ActivityPub users who do not want working search and discovery. I think that's equivalent to saying they don't want the network to gain mainstream popularity.
It does look like it's possible to independently host all the components of the ATProto network now, so I'm hoping we'll see a bunch of services pop up soon such that the network becomes more resistant to enshittification. I've seen Whitewind and Frontpage, but I don't fully understand the federation model and haven't been able to cause one to display posts from another.