I will use PayPal when making purchases, mostly to keep from giving my payment information directly to yet another company that could handle it improperly.
Not to say that PayPal wouldn’t misuse the information too, but it’s one company that might misuse my information vs many companies, so I’ll go with the one.
My impression is that AT_Protocol lends itself to decentralized computing resources moreso than decentralized control or authority.
In the fediverse, instance owners have pretty strong control over their instance, the content it hosts, the people who can use it, etc. Bluesky takes advantage of self hosters for more distribution and reliability, but still maintains centralized control over content and user management.
The key difference, to me, is that if someone doesn’t like how the main Mastodon instances are running, they can make their own and have a completely separate network from those bad actors without rebuilding the world. With Bluesky, there’s not really any exit door like that.