My impression is that there are some topics that have taken off into decent discussions (I've discussed the Assange and Applebaum situations a few times for example), but there are indeed key people missing, and also general "density".

I have hopes that the OStatus network will grow, and I think a key "killer feature" could be abuse handling - twitter is honestly really bad about this. If instance admins feel, or are seen as, responsible for the abuse, harassment and other similar things that goes on on their instances, then hopefully the abusive people will be confined to a number of instances that can be blocked entirely.

This can also tie into the "free speech" maximalism that some admins/moderators are using to absolve themselves from abusive use of their instances. With federated, open protocols, you can be picky without "censoring" - if the "censored" dispute your judgement they can just go to a different instance and still participate in the network.