This is right. The Fediverse and Mastodon aren't products. As the most widespread implementation of ActivityPub (and AGPL'ed to boot), Mastodon, like WordPress and the Linux kernel before it, is more like a force of nature.
It's something that more and more people will adopt over time because it's free and "good enough" for some use cases. A fraction of those who adopt it will contribute to it and it will improve. The longer this virtuous cycle continues the harder it is to stop. Over several decades it will commoditize a chunk of a technology layer that's currently proprietary (basically, the social graph). Maybe a huge chunk of it.
Again just like Linux and WordPress - there will be lots of of critics and naysaying from people who don't understand the economics of the software industry (or in some cases simply don't want to). They will be wrong, again. They will moan about it for many years after it has become successful. History repeats.
I hope you're right. But it does have to achieve escape velocity. There are lots of interesting open source projects that never quite made it. Jabber/XMPP, for instance: it seemed like it would inevitably take over messaging for a while in the early 00s...but then a flood of richer chat apps washed it away, and we were stuck in a world of walled gardens again. Jabber never quite died, but it certainly didn't live up to it's full potential.
the AP ecosystem is a genie that can't be placed back inside the bottle, it can not be bought by a single malicious actor (or nation-state), and it was built openly by folks associated by the W3C as a standard specification for anyone to freely implement. looking forward for media and the public sector (emergency comms etc) to get on board.
It's something that more and more people will adopt over time because it's free and "good enough" for some use cases. A fraction of those who adopt it will contribute to it and it will improve. The longer this virtuous cycle continues the harder it is to stop. Over several decades it will commoditize a chunk of a technology layer that's currently proprietary (basically, the social graph). Maybe a huge chunk of it.
Again just like Linux and WordPress - there will be lots of of critics and naysaying from people who don't understand the economics of the software industry (or in some cases simply don't want to). They will be wrong, again. They will moan about it for many years after it has become successful. History repeats.