What happened to the attempt to get Akondi set up as a freedesktop.org standard? I can't seem to find any information on it online.

Due to the extremely long wait, the request for hosting on freedesktop.org was cancelled. This does not impact of becoming a standard in any way.

The project infrastructure request was closed by the freedesktop.org site adminitrators, mostly because of misunderstanding the request, Akonadi, etc. as one can clearly see in the comment closing the request (no. 6) and our response (no. 9)

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15711

However, due to extremly slow reaction time of the site wrangler team, probably caused by being way to few people, hosting any development there would probably a bad idea anyway.
Just consider how bad it would be if a new contributor had to wait months to get a commit account vs. a couple of hours to get one at KDE's SVN.

Of course increasing the awareness of the cross-desktop nature would have been benefitial as some people might not understand that software in the kdesupport module can't have any KDE dependencies.

And it isn't quite about standards, it is more about providing a shared implementation to a common problem.

freedesktop.org "standards" are specifications proposed to, worked on and implemented by the major Free Software Desktop projects, such as the desktop-entry specification or the trash specification.

No software hosted at freedesktop.org is a standard in anyway, in this regard the site is no different than sourceforge.net or berlios.de

Hosting software at freedesktop.org instead of gnome.org or kde.org is mostly for encouraging developers of other projects to consider contributing.
Technically those two other projects are at least currently a better choice due to their well maintained infrastructure and reasonable admin response times.

So far we are not aware of any potential contributor hesitating because the code is on KDE's servers.

Cheers,
_