The fediverse solved the federation problem and then rediscovered everything else is hard
ActivityPub works. Cross-server identity, no single ownership — architecturally it's what federation skeptics said couldn't scale. The Mastodon surge after Twitter's ownership change proved genuine demand exists when a platform becomes hostile.
What it hasn't solved is everything downstream of the protocol. Discovery is still "find someone you already know and get tagged in a post." Local and federated timelines work for small, topic-specific instances and break badly for anyone trying to explore outside their server. New users arrive, can't find anything, and leave.
Threads federating is the most interesting stress test. A Meta product using ActivityPub to pull in external followers while keeping its own algorithm and monetization intact is either the protocol's biggest real-world validation, or the opening move of the playbook we've seen before — embrace, extend, then make the standard irrelevant by capturing all the value above it. Probably both simultaneously.
The question underneath is whether the fediverse is trying to build a structurally different thing from existing social media, or just a better-governed version of the same thing. Right now it's mostly doing the second, which is useful but probably not the transformation the 2022 migration wave hoped for.
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