In my opinion, ActivityPub is way too complicated, and federating is just too hard to do for smaller projects. You mention that there are many new projects – this has been the case for a while. Last time I looked, nearly all of them had failed/stopped/paused before actually getting federation working. The test suite is down, and has been for at least a year:
https://test.activitypub.rocks
I think that ActivityPub should have started out far simpler, and it should have been in reach of hobbyist developers. Something probably closer to RSS, with verify-from-source rather than cryptographically signed posts.
Just my experience, obviously. I would love to be able to write and run my own little Twitter-like instance that people can subscribe to, but I can't because ActivityPub was too difficult for me to get working.
Yeah, that's lame. According to the Github issue it's been down since March 2019 [0]
OP wrote an unofficial Activity Streams test suite [1] to fill the gap [2].
[0] https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/337
[1] https://github.com/go-fed/testsuite
[2] https://mastodon.technology/@cj/104519578501508322
edit: link correction
I think there's certainly a part around "but I can't see the difference" - it's hard to get rapid feedback on if it's better or worse, since you won't notice the difference in change to setup.
In any case, being able to create a pulseaudio sink that puts the audio from one application through a noise removal chain sounds to me like a decent "quick fix" for me - I've tried to listen to some webinars with such horrible audio it was pretty much impossible to listen to, yet with otherwise worthwhile content. I wonder if this would be enough to improve it, or if the issues lie elsewhere (low quality transcodes).