I feel the issue is that most discussion takes place in other settings and on different channels, mostly ad-hoc between individuals who looked into each other’s codebases to figure out how to interoperate on something. The casual discussions on SocialHub are progressing very slowly with long time intervals between posts, and they often peter out without any real decision made. This understandably leads to devs just implementing and focus on standardization later (which may or may not happen, and may be just as ad-hoc).
And if someone decides to take the effort and write a FEP, with the small amount of federated devs we have, they are likely to be the only one to which the enhancement is important at that time. Gathering proper feedback becomes an involved process in time and effort. Or takes place insufficiently or not at all. If something is truly new, then the early adopter automatically becomes the decider.
All this is not necessarily a problem. We can decide that the way this works is okay and fine. But it is imho good to brainstorm about process improvement to streamline all this. @weex is doing this in the open in #community category, and anyone including @pukkamustard and @cjs is free to respond. Agree that we should use forum structure as intended and only make changes with informed consent by those responsible and involved.
Note that I too gave FEP feedback in March, got some feedback, responded and since then the topic has languished (until recently with renewed intention to pick up the FEP process). The notion that things weren’t running smoothly yet, was also shared by me. But is also still young and remains largely untested in practice (for AP community), so that may be as expected.
The larger problem (maybe… it can also be just my impression) is that this community now constitutes mostly of ‘just a forum’. I don’t feel there exists a real Community of Action that is at work here to evolve the fediverse. Just people publishing interesting posts and having discussions.