Maybe Bluesky has "won"

My only problem with ActivityPub or atproto is that they were not static hostable.

For readonly nodes they should be. Otherwise we could see tons of adoptions by bloggers, with some simple Github/Cloudflare Pages setup.

You can already have an ActivityPub server with your static website generator, there are a few examples (one is based on Hugo). https://maho.dev/2024/02/a-guide-to-implementing-activitypub... https://fedipage.com/

Obviously they don't implement every part of the protocol nor every feature Mastodon has.