Fedora Must (Carefully) Embrace Flathub

didn't read the article, but i never got the point of having a distro-specific flathub repo. isn't being distro-agnostic the main thing about flatpaks?

It's about making sure you know what is inside the flatpaks. If you make your own set of flatpaks, you can distribute them with the OS. It's not that fedora flatpaks aren't distro-agnostic, you can use them on any distro. They just want a set where they can verify the build process and trust.
- then why not just use regular packages?
Not distro specific. They are Flatpaks built according to Fedora’s philosophy. But you can use them anywhere. I’ve used them on Ubuntu and OpenSUSE.
- sounds weird to me. aren't we replicating the repository problem if each distro decides to make a flatpak repo according to their own philosophies?

That "article" is painful to try and read, it's like a run on thought that bounces all over the place. The author really should make a clear outline and could probably cut out half by not saying the same thing over and over and over again. I stopped after the third time I read about Fedora flatpaks are different from flathub flatpaks, and users like flathub more, but the author is apparently eventually going to explain why that's an issue after 2K words of nonsense.

Uhm, isn't bazzite practically what the author is asking for?

That's certainly part of the motivation (see the 4th paragraph).
Yes, image based. No, not Bazzite specifically, but silverblue (and kinoite) under the fedora banner directly.
But that's not really the point of the article. In order for those to go mainstream, flatpak and especially flathub have a lot of maturing to do first, and the author lays out a pretty good roadmap with thorough explanations.
- They're already mainstream, any belief otherwise is ridiculous to the point of being parody.
  Meanwhile you have Fedora getting legal threats because they're shipping broken software in their own flatpak repo that exists only to waste developer time and project resources at the expense of its users and their experience.
- That’s kind of what the ublue project is doing. Bazzite is a part of that, of course. But it also has more “normal” versions like Bluefin (gnome) and Aurora (plasma).
Not at all.
Bazzite preinstalls Flathub apps by default. The author still wants to use Fedora Flatpaks for the preinstalled apps.
Bazzite ships Flathub unfiltered. The author wants to only show FLOSS software built on trusted platforms by default (so no taking a precompiled binary and shipping that).
Bazzite ships Flathub in spite of its flaws. The author wants Fedora to work with Flathub to clean up its issues before shipping the remote by default.
- Bazzite ships Flathub unfiltered.
  Last update (which replaced Discover with Bazaar) changed that.
  so no taking a precompiled binary and shipping that.
  All FLOSS apps on Flathub are built on trusted platforms by default, in the open and verifiable. Same thing with Brew.
  Not including proprietary software in the default config is a valid choice every distro has to make.
  The sudden success of Bazzite comes from how easy it is to use.
Bazzite is popular precisely because we ignore bad opinions such as these. Flathub is mainstream and all the whinging in the world isn't going to change that.

It's great they're having this discussion, but some of the arguments seem overblown and imply Flathub does less reviewing of app than actually does.

Outdated runtimes aren't great either, but as they learned with OBS, just updating to the newest version broke a bunch of stuff.

See this blog post for a response that was made to similar criticisms during the OBS issue. Flathub Safety: A Layered Approach from Source to User

We can flag old runtimes as out of date. Individual users or whole distros can set preferences to anvoid out of date runtimes. But Flathab must support out of date runtimes.
If an app has not been updated, I want it to continue running.
I want FlatHub to support binary only apps (like commercial ones) as well.
FlatHub is supposed to be the easy, one-stop place to publish apps. If I cannot put my app there, it is a problem.
It is supposed to be the place I get apps that will run on my distro. If the app I use daily that has not been updated in 10 years stops working, I am annoyed.
Fedora wants to deprecate runtimes that would still be “stable” on Debian.
What OBS did was bad. They should not have stuck to an EOL runtime, period. It would have been better if they temporarily moved to a supported freedesktop runtime and vendored in their Qt dependencies. That way, they would have been using a supported runtime while still using their outdated Qt version until the upstream issues were fixed.
- What they did was bad but I am glad the Flatpak kept working.

Why only Fedora?

Fedora maintains its own Flatpak repo that competes with Flathub. This is about merging them.