Wow, I didn't know Podcastindex.social existed, magnificent!
Yes, the idea would be to set up a "hybrid" solution combining the solidity and flexibility of Mastodon (that doesn't require from each instance to host the whole chain transactions history) and the self-sustainable rewarding mechanism of Hive, through a crypto.
I'm looking for an infrastructure that could allow the thousands of Salvadorans we're teaching the importance of decentralisation and the use of LN to communicate inside our Community: why not coupling the creation of LN nodes with the one of autonomous e-mail and forum servers, where worthy forum posts would be upvoted with sats? (a friend told me about "Sphinx Chat", but it seems that there one has to pay sats to send each message, and the servers owners are the only ones to be rewarded).