Different worldviews, new ways to reason about existing issues, raised awareness of other problems, cultures, people. And straight out more knowledge about many things (even if you read only fiction). Overall, you can move forward from a perhaps more simplistic version of the world.

Also, just the increased ability to read and understand stuff should not be underestimated. Many people can read, as in putting letters together to form words, but not read in the sense of understanding anything beyond the most basic of sentences. You’ll get scammed less often. get better deals, etc.

While I’m not entirely sure wat it actually means, the message you get on that site right now might be the reason (some kind of experiment gone wrong artificially inflating the numbers):

I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far. We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.

All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed. The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.

I trawled unintentionally.

Is federated authentication being considered for the future? The federated model of the fediverse is great, but it runs into problems when instances “die”, you want to access different servers as they federate with different things, etc. leading to the need of having multiple accounts. If there were a decentralized network of auth servers, could use the same credentials everywhere.