I love both @how’s and your response. It makes very clear the breath and scope, but also the complexity that inherently comes with it. There’s so many choices to make in terms of processess, techstack, organization and project governance, as well as how you involve your stakeholders and ensure you’ll deliver what they want and need.
(Note: I am going a bit wide in my response, so please bear with me or skip sections…)
Fediverse Futures
All-in-all I think this goes way beyond what a project like FedeProxy can deliver. For the paradigm to be meaningfully realized, an ecosystem of projects should dedicate to the vision and gradually fill in parts and gaps like a quilt. And it would help if these were more task-oriented in their design (see: From silo-first to task-oriented federated app design).
The paradigm of “United Software Development” itself, would stand on its own as an independent initiative. One that anyone can embrace, and that explores ideas, visions, concepts, etc. where people may jump in to elaborate in whatever way.
Note that this is the reason why I set up Fediverse Futures. Because the way of thinking (out-of-the-box) and approach of exploring what “leveraging the decentralized web” means, is something that individual FOSS projects cannot address by themselves. And it requires strong community, with - I am hoping - SocialHub playing a key role.
Without such efforts, we get a “watered down cup of federated tea” with, as I described elsewhere, approaches such as:
- I want forum → I develop forum → How can forum federate?
- I want video → I develop video → How can video federate?
I am thinking of ways to take this initiative next-level, beyond TL;DR forum topics and with a separate non-technical companion Fediverse Futures brainstorming area on Lemmy. I feel this should be part of Organizing for SocialHub Community Empowerment.
Sustainable communities
Part of @how’s addendum to United Software Development rightfully refers to both the sustainability of the FOSS projects as well as the communities they serve. It includes the economics, the innovative and new business and revenue models that society needs to progress to a bright future.
This is a subject very dear to my heart as well, and one I intend to help explore in all aspects (note that all my work as humanetech, FOSS and fedi advocate, makes me poorer and poorer, spending savings I made from a previous IT career. It is NOT sustainable in the long run, atm).
One Fediverse Futures topic that ‘Sustainable Communities’ hinges on, say the groundwork, is another paradigm:
Forget the technical aspects for a bit. What this paradigm should solve is that there’s a gazillion communities, all doing much-needed positive things, but doing them in a very fragmented landscape without much awareness of complementary or overlapping initiatives. This way we are missing out on the synergy, or outright reinventing wheels.
“Community Has No Boundary” then is first and foremost a binding force and communication medium to bring all this closer together. The decentralized web is an excellent foundation to build this upon.
Then, when there’s a more solid concept of what Community entails, we come to how they interact in a social fabric. And now we get to different domains to be modeled on top of community concepts. E.g. we get to Governance. Note again that the domain exsists regardless of technical implementation, and that - depending on context and situation - different governance models are applicable. They have different scopes too… governance within communities and across communities, for instance.
Not easy to model, but just like ActivityStreams did for “Social Interaction” there could be ‘starter models’ that fill in the primitives. With Governance there might be e.g. Governance Policy where there’s an endless variation of policies, but the semantic model to define them need not be specified in detail from the start.
@hamishcampbell is having solid ideas and exploring What would a fediverse "governance" body look like?
While both Community and Governance are independent domains wrt FedeProxy’s core domain, it should be clear that the project may use them to model on top of. And that doing so yields benefits, as the domains - when expressed as Linked Data vocabularies and AP extensions - allows others to independently extend/expand the ecosystem.
(Nothing new here… this is the whole idea of AP being a Linked Data spec, but on the whole this aspect is under-utilized and much of its potential remains untapped)
Federated Development
@anon20068248 my talents aren’t that great either 
I am just zooming out to a very high level, thinking strategically about a future Fediverse, and then hand some - hopefully - inspiring ideas, hoping they’ll trigger others to jump in and brainstorm wildly with me, and elaborate together. You just did that in a fabulous way.
The idea you just outlined is deeply inspiring on its own, and fits right under the umbrella of United Software Development. It combines with the Community + Governance addressed above.
I think what it boils down to is that the concept of a Project already constitutes sort of a silo, that - in many cases - hampers the potential unity of people involved and using it.
In the current workflows of git and online code forges a lot of collaboration concepts are already present, but they might be taken a way further than they currently are. A Fork sort of means “You have the freedom to do it your own way”, but in doing so (if it is beyond the purpose of creating a PR) you effectively spin up your own Project, a new silo, with a promise of “Maybe we get together later or at least still benefit from each other”. But this is implicit. Note, Gogs and Gitea are good example of this.
The federated development, part of United Software Development, would mean this boxed-in concept of Projects fades. Instead of loose collection of Projects that may or may not cooperate, you get to the idea of a Development Process that starts along certain Objectives, and then becomes a ‘living thing’… it organically branches out across the decentralized web driven by anyone’s incentive to add to it.
It is a great dream, and should be part of the United Software Development vision.