While I see your point about product mentality, and agree to a large extent, I am not sure it applies to ActivityPub. Its like saying email needed to be productized; it didn't, we just needed productized implementations of email servers and clients to get the network going.
Email was there before outlook and Gmail and will still be long after Gmail sunsets it and Microsoft rebrands outlook to something like "Microsoft xbox delayed chat system".
And nobody used it, relatively speaking vs the extraordinary scale that those email products made possible later.
Hotmail had more users after 18 months than the total history of all email services on earth combined for the first two decades of email. If email was still as annoying to use as it was pre AOL & Hotmail, the general public still wouldn't be using it today.
Perhaps, but no particular web implementation of email really stands out. (You might say Gmail, Gmail is really comparatively recent.) So a web interface on email push adoption further.
It might be more accurate to say that a social standard would need to support productized client evolutions that outlook and others provided along the way of email’s evolutionary path.
You're missing the point. Like you said, Mosaic was ALREADY a great product, compared to the nerdy terminal browsers without embedded media, etc.
OP's point is not whether netscape or mosaic is better, but that the graphical web browser was what brought the web mainstream. Doesn't matter if it's mosaic or netscape (or several other graphical ui browser competitors that existed during that time)
