Prior to Mastodon and the fediverse if you wanted to create a real and viable social media platform it would cost you millions.

Mastodon being well developed product that it is (thanks to @Gargron ) really and truly gives news orgs the power to run their own social site for hundreds to thousands of dollars, not millions.

The SMART orgs like @politico , @TheConversationUS, @texastribune , @texastribune and countless others took the risk made the jump and will benefit greatly because of it.