Given that the Django web app framework was invented for a newspaper (Lawrence Journal-World) I have high hopes this will potentially provide a way for employed journalists to federate, as well as contribute to the underlying open source project.
As I recall, Varnish was also written for a newspaper. I think it's pretty common for older web technology.
Mastodon is written in Rails, I think. What makes you say that it will be an instance written in Django?
I believe OP's point was that historically journalism organizations have had a positive impact on open source tools. Not that they are directly related.