dragonX

Not their fault, they can nevertheless make it sensorship resistant if they:
1 - stopped working on gimmicks and started rolling out usernames
2- Integrated a tor service for use when needed, or just route requests through Tor while Orbot takes care of the rest.

Because until recently they didn't achieve mass adoption.
I bet many more countries will fellow suit (maybe Brazil, Turkey, the middle east, some African countries, Russia, .... ) or try and throttle connection to push people to give-up!

Yeah, they want civil protests, as: send your cute cat meme to your representatives next time. or go moan on twitter while you can.

If big names join the fediverse. they ask for ways of identity verification to protect themselves from identity theft.
I in one hand like the idea of the fediverse becoming mainstream. but I don't want to submit official docs, phone numbers and biometrics just to have a social profile.

I actually have no clue! but for a big project like WordPress with huge contributers It shouldn't be that hard.

Signal: refuses federation, refuses sign up without phone numbers
Iran: blocks internet usage of signals, and blocks sms account verification
China: Does the same
Signal: surprised pikachu face (pika pika)

I don't think at this stage of infancy of the Fediverse, putting the effort to convince large news website with millions of viewers a month will work, their viewerbase is bigger than that of all the fediverse projects active monthly users combined.
But convincing CMS developpers of Wordpress, Drupal ,Joomla & al. to implement a compatibility layer with ActivityPub, will help spread the use of the protocol faster. and bring more interoperability, especially considering the huge amount of websites and blog run on top of those CMS(s).

You can't have notifications over RSS. Notifications are the unavoidable driving power of social apps these days.

If news websites, magazines, and blogs (Wordpress, jumla, drupal and other cms) could implement ActivityPub, so that we could subscribe to them and have the feed appear on our fediverse accounts. it will give more incentive for people to switch. This could be a replacement to RSS too.

I was waiting for something like this to come up, cheers!
Here is my idea of a FLOSS dating platform. I believe you can make a lightweight project by making it behave just like a profiles gallery, you can make use of pixelfed's code to speed up the process.
you can also let people fill their profiles with their federated social media content. by pulling profile pics, bios, and posts and linking them to the their dating profile.
As for direct chats, because of how sensitive this data is. you can let people add their instant messenger handles, like matrix, xmpp, briar, or jami accounts and carry on the chatting using those platforms. this will save the instance admins from a lot of legal responsibility.

I have tried Jami about more than a year ago, It has its promise. but they need to work on resolving many connectivity issues. I might go back to checking it later.
I find it sad that this app isn't more advertised and talked about in privacy and security circle it definitely deserves more light. but hey we always flock t champion the winner.
as for session, I don't like the direction the devs are taking, as they are switching to using Loki net instead of tor. and they will be tying the app more and more with their blockchain and cryptocurrency. this is enough for me to stay clear as I can't trust projects developed on money insentives

I have always had my doubts about how open and transparent signal is to its community, I so far have resisted the urge to join signal because of how adamant they are to creating yet another walled garden around their platform.
They have times and times again shown their disdain to interacting with their user base (unlike other open source platforms) and answering valid questions and concerns from their community. and them keeping secrecy about what is being worked behind the scenes and their very vague and evasive answers about future features.
To me signal's attitude is more inline with silicon valley venture startups than with a non-profit who listens to its user base concerns and needs. though they are working hard on switching more whatsapp users and keep growing.
They ignored the most asked feature for years which is the ability to sign-up without the need of a phone number. while they kept rolling meaningless features to privacy like reactions, stickers, backgrounds, group chats.. and kept answering that usernames are coming, but didn't give any details to how that would be implemented.
Hopefully Berty if released could become a viable solution. as to me right now signal isn't more than a whatsapp clone if they don't give up reliance on phone numbers