y'know, this would be the opportunity for Google to gain some clout in the social network world.

Start up a hosted mastodon instance, make a bit of fuzz and PR around it, and then over time invest some resources into making it more awesome. All for relatively little effort, compared to starting a new social network from scratch. The largest effort would likely go into moderation on that instance.

Who else could do that? Maybe New York Times? Apple? It needs to be someone with an established brand, and the engineering skills to run it at scale.

(Disclaimer: not my own idea, heard it somewhere else -- maybe on risky.biz?)