Fair. Without doubt, there's some bias/aspiration in OP's post. There is, though, a kernel of interest in the confluence of Mastodon/ActivityPub and mainstream media outlets. The latter have become subservient to the social media platforms and it has, at best, been an uneasy alliance for them. Twitter/X has probably been the most successful; Meta's disagreement in Canada [0] is towards the other end.
Mastodon/ActivityPub presents a chink of opportunity for mainstream media. Rather than being subservient to 3rd party platforms, they can run their own - e.g. social.bbc. Users can sign up and follow who they like, see what they like, and not be subjected to the commercial drivers of a 3rd party platform and its selection algorithms.
Of course, that's a huge risk for extant platforms. Meta's intention to federate Threads is pretty clearly an effort to counter that potential threat.
It would also need a significant level of investment, commitment and coordination among the broadcasters. So it's definitely in the "possible" rather than "probable" bucket.
Which brings us back to the OP. It can justly be seen as hope over evidence, at least at the moment. But there is at least an opportunity underpinning it.
> Meta's intention to federate Threads is pretty clearly an effort to counter that potential threat.
I'm starting to get the impression they aren't very serious about that. I expected if they were going to do it, they would have done it by now.
I don't expect the same of other products that have announced intent to federate such as Flickr and Tumblr, as they're much older codebases and the companies don't have Meta's resources.
It's just some people seeking to pit mastodon and threads against each other, no matter what with no limit to dishonesty when it's "against a big bad corporation". Sure, they can go ahead, it just might look ridiculous. The 'my secret club!'-ness is showing. There's some faint thread of 'disdain of masses' with mastodon, with stuff like backlash against potential influx of hundreds of millions of people, which they seemingly do not want to happen. It's kind of a strange paradoxical angle on information availability. Which also makes it only weirder for stuff like this that pretends to care about whether there's a news outlet out there serving information to public, when that public getting on is treated like a problem.
There is some kind of a fork for twitter-like platforms with a question of 'do they want for it to actually become a platform that could/would serve hundreds of millions of users'. It seems like it leans more towards 'no' than otherwise. Not even technologically, but just 'based on vibes'.
Mastodon/ActivityPub presents a chink of opportunity for mainstream media. Rather than being subservient to 3rd party platforms, they can run their own - e.g. social.bbc. Users can sign up and follow who they like, see what they like, and not be subjected to the commercial drivers of a 3rd party platform and its selection algorithms.
Of course, that's a huge risk for extant platforms. Meta's intention to federate Threads is pretty clearly an effort to counter that potential threat.
It would also need a significant level of investment, commitment and coordination among the broadcasters. So it's definitely in the "possible" rather than "probable" bucket.
Which brings us back to the OP. It can justly be seen as hope over evidence, at least at the moment. But there is at least an opportunity underpinning it.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/canada-news-facebook-meta-instagram-1850...