Except federation is already functional with 3rd party implementations. Sure it's possible they would choose to diverge in the official implementation in a closed branch, but that would not stop the rest of the clients from working. It's like if the biggest Mastodon instance went proprietary and shut down federation, the people who care would leave.
The main things they're working on are moderation tools suitable for federation as well as scaling
You can initialize your account with your own DID key using web DID instead of the current (technically placeholder DID) and you won't be dependent on their servers for authentication. Especially in the federation sandbox that's available for 3rd parties
They're focusing on scaling and moderation tools that can handle federation better (especially spam management), they don't think that's ready yet. But you can federation it in their sandbox environment
Every single component have 3rd party implementations or an alternative which doesn't depend on them (standard account DID lookups go through their servers but web DID is fully independent). The options he says nobody will create ALREADY EXISTS
The protocol literally doesn't allow them to be gatekeepers.
Uhm no not at all, 3rd party servers already exists and people can talk across them, telegram has no relevance here
They do have an open protocol (atprotocol) but it's not compatible with anything existing
They have federation on in their sandbox network with 3rd party clients already working, but it's not going to talk activitypub
Yeah and also Gmail should defederate Skype.
... Wait what's that it's different protocols? Oh well
They do send out invites to the waiting list but it definitely don't represent the majority of invites being sent out
Xitter (pronounced shitter)
Yeah they're working hard on scaling, they've had recurring performance issues but have managed to get it stable again even with higher load now
Nostr is a wildly different protocol from atprotocol and activitypub.
Activitypub is very much like email (SMTP) over http, pushing messages between servers. Atprotocol is instead using a model of a repository with profile and posts per user on federated servers along with aggregation servers (CDN-ish) and a pull model for retrieval. Nostr is a P2P protocol with "gossip nodes"