Generally disagree. If you want the Fediverse to become a large open standard, if not the largest, then this is going to just be a matter of course. Companies will seek to commodify all their offerings, whether they use open standards or not. Many exist that commodify on top of open-source software and open standards. The important part is to ACHEIVE the open standard to begin with, and I think it’s short-sighted to pre-emptively block something that could be a strong item down that path, and before it might show itself to be more harmful towards that goal.

It can always be blocked later, situation-depending.

I’m in IT and work with normies all day, the number of people to whom even just that will flummox and they’ll just not bother is frankly overwhelming. 😝

“Exclusively?” No. But obviously its initial appeal was to the more tech-savvy and FOSS-centric sort, and it’s byzantine enough to jump in that it dissuades many newcomers who try.

But ActivityPub does seem to look like it will pull in larger services (like Threads) so in the end “protocols over platforms” may win out by default, sorts like WebKit/Blink/Chromium has. Not everyone gonna use Brave or Opera, but the mass of Chrome users will still feed back in some fashion.