Is there a reason why all the services, that use the ActivityPub protocol don’t have a unified API?
None of the mastodon apps allow me to log in with a lemmy/kbin account.
Also none of the lemmy apps allow me to log in with a kbin account.
Even though kbin has both mastodon (microblogging) and lemmy (threads, communities) functionality.
Also, Pixelfed recently introduced “login with Mastodon”, but all it really does is just create a new user on it’s instance and copy over the mastodon followers and profile info.
Why can’t we just have one account to rule them all?
My limited view on the Fediverse makes it seem very human operated, but I’ll trust your judgement given your experience in these matters. I don’t trust the statistics (2 million active Lemmy users, but Lemmy feeds drying up after two or three pages? No way!) but the accounts I do see just feel more genuine, I guess.
As for journalists, verification is key. I haven’t seen any journalist that wouldn’t voluntary write the publication they work for in their bio. Mastodon provides a way to verify your relationship with an arbitrary web page (i.e. https://news.example/people/f.m.lastname) by providing a special value in the page HTML, regardless of what server they’re on. I think that would be an excellent solution.
I agree with you on ad based services, but I don’t think we’re in the majority here. No matter how much people complain about ads and tracking, they just don’t want or can’t afford to pay for the services they’re using. This only leave predatory money making tactics if you want to make money off the content you create. When 𝕏 dies a slow death, Bluesky’s enshittification will begin.