There are clear benefits from hosting and controlling the instance, but then you need to dedicate resources to moderation if you can’t find enough volunteers.
Not only resources for moderation, you would also have to pay the servers. When running multiple fediverse servers, and having some expectations in terms of availability and performance, costs sum up. Your funds are limited, and if they come from donations, those people did not donate for you to spend on additional, not directly project-related infrastructure, but to work on your actual projects.
There’s clearly a value and a route toward companies hosting their own federated comms. It’s like how email became self-hosted in the '90s: first the bitnets and aols, and unis and orgs, and finally, thanks to Outlook tasting email on the way in, email viruses.
The same progression will probably repeat for Lemmy and mastodon. Consolidation and self-archiving and all that are valuable, and once HPe finds out how to link ChatGPT to a Lemmy or mastodon, they’ll be all in with something suiting their current quality trend.
Ideally we’ll have gone crypto by then for private messaging, and go farther for privacy than email and fbchat seems to be able, and that’ll be nice.
It will take years of the community requesting for it (on the non-federated platforms) unless someone really high up in the right org has a personal interest in doing it.
I’ve often wondered this myself because they’ve got the inhouse engineering talent to do it. If I had to guess, I think they don’t see an immediate and a direct benefit. In the grand scheme of things, the #fediverse is still small but it is making rather exponential games.
Also, maybe these companies are just in the planning stages and we just don’t know about it yet.
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