I didn’t make the criteria to define what a “Fediverse project” can or cannot include, just commenting that it seems to be based on people’s hopes and dreams. e.g. Sublinks, though that one had little to no activity for so long that people really did lose hope for awhile, while Loops is at least actively continuing its development - even though as you say not specifically in terms of federating.

Worst of all is how if the code were released, people would outright do that task for the chief developer, so holding back the codebase (to decide on a specific license or whatever other reason) is the primary limitation. Though - just like Sublinks - if there were any other project that even came close to promising to fulfill that same functionality (as Lemmy does for the forum-based Threadiverse) then people would forget all about Loops. Instead, right now it’s the only one of its kind.