The good thing about a protocol (which ActivityPub is) is that it's not so much a matter of one person's bad software crashing my good software somehow, as it is a question of either forming your packets correctly, and getting good discourse in your federated software, or forming your packets badly, and having your software be algorithmically treated as "deprecated" or spit back an error response or whatever. Protocols act as a bit of a filter that way, it seems to me - each operator can surge forward in terms of bleeding-edge features, or stubbornly refuse to upgrade their versions, but there will eventually be a Wordpress-like herd instinct that will result in a settled "current" version (or version range) that works well enough.

Whatever version of the protocol becomes widely used among the small existing userbase of whatever protocol wins the popularity lottery will gain support from that community, which will create the usual feedback loop of improvements and greater stability as more resources are brought to bear on making it work, and by the time the punters show up it'll be pretty well-baked, and some early adopters might get burned. I insisted on Betamax back in '83, and I had to live with Betamax till about 87. First world adolescent problems.

It's never been more evident that the social platforms as they exist today are an overall social sickness, in ways that every previous Threat To The Children that I've lived with (drugs, video games, heavy metal music, etc) turned out not to be. So, we have to move to something different or else just plummet into barbarism, which even with the current situation I am betting against. People want hot water when they turn the tap and they'll settle the hell down and beg to help bring it back if they get a real taste of missing meals en masse. Dog help any elites hoarding resources on that day.

On a practical and constructive note, someone else mentioned smaller, more locally-based platforms, and that is the only thing that seems workable to me as a way forward. I used to run BBSes in the 80s and early 90s, and was guilty of Digital Utopianism in extremis through to the naughts. The source of that utopianism was how good the old BBSes were at giving a loser like me a social community and real friends, and also how that experience was largely replicated, in a morphed kind of way, on Usenet and later in some, but not all, web-based forums. MySpace was my first real inkling that things were going very wrong.

I live in the Manitoba Interlake, and I've been pondering what a local, BBS-like web site, perhaps using ActivityPub in some way and focused on my area would look like, in terms of operation, preventing abuse, etc. The BBSes were kind of an underground society of sorts, but a largely benign one focused strictly on fun, and the fact that we were all in the same city and would likely have to face each other at some gathering enforced some basic politeness rules that vanished with the perceived anonymity of this place.

Back when I was a Sysop, I used to require an actual phone call before giving users leech access (ie. to the file section with the all the goodies). Not because I thought of it, it was just how we did things, kinda like that guy who did the Ted Talk where he was holding the printout with the names and addresses of "everyone on the internet" sometime in the mid-80s. We all had fake handles, absolutely all of us, but we all knew each other's real names, back then. I think anything less than that anti-anonymity will degenerate into some degree of whatever we end up calling this social jock itch we're all living through, so I'm probably gonna try putting something like that up for my local community. There's a new ISP deploying fibre right this moment, and I might talk to them about handling the hosting, and limiting traffic only to their network or traffic verified to be originating from this geographical area.

The solution to all this is gonna be small and widespread, not big and centralized, whatever the case.