That's an extremely short sighted opinion.
ActivityPub is an extremely versatile protocol that resembles a lot like speech.
Some guy made a bunch of "smart" devices communicate with eachother through his own GNU social instance. Essentially making his house a "smart" home.
It’s not very surprising. I was looking around for an easy way to set up anythi g using ActivityPub using a single docker instance, and all the big players are ‘check out from source and run directly on your server’. No thanks.
I think there are probably two main groups interested in ActivityPub. The 80% will want to just register on someone else's instance. The rest are nerds who will set up their instances for fun, and will not be massively hindered by the lack of simple set-up options. I would guess that users like you ('curious, but not invested') would likely not gravitate to ActivityPub anyway, and almost certainly not to hosting your own instance.
I cannot relate to this way of thinking. That's about the entire city of Manchester. Do dozens of people live in Manchester? 500K is vastly more than any average person can ever hope to have as followers on Twitter; it's not a ceiling anyone debating joining Mastodon can reasonably run into unless they are a celebrity -- and those have the power to pull in anyone from anywhere.
