[syntheweave]

One major way in which "this time is different" is that the financial cost of the hosting is a tiny fraction of what it once was, and doesn't drive consolidation so strongly towards larger-cap players. It's not quite to the point of "too cheap to meter", but definitely in the realm of where donations can work.

And the underlying software has had the time to work out a lot of the nuances of this design and how to get it to a larger scale successfully. It could still break if the whole planet took up ActivityPub, but it's a hell of a lot closer to the ideal than what happened with the pre-Web protocols.