It “won” by being there. It’s technically bad, and the way federation is done is a special kind of stupid when applied at scale. If it was pull-based instead of push-based without changing much else, that alone would have made many federation issue that ACTUALLY HAPPENED impossible, although that alone is not sufficient to make it pass as “good” still.

Did it win?

Right on. You put into words what I haven’t been able to easily explain.

I stumbled upon ActivityPub years ago and it appealed to me because it was built upon tried and true components of the web that I’ve been cutting my teeth on for years.

ATProto is novel for the sake of being novel. I don’t feel it solves what it sets out to solve without introducing friction if you deviate from the happy path.