This was my thought as well. It makes sense for companies to setup their own Fediverse instances. It provides them a way to reach their customers without having to rely on another company acting as the middleman.

Mastodon is really solid and with the Dutch government and the BBC running their own instance I imagine others will follow suite.

Still not sure about a Reddit replacement though since both Lemmy and kBin have their problems.

Spin up a PeerTube instance and companies have an effective means of setting up discussion forums for their products, a news feed for broadcasting updates, and a video hosting solution that can all be tied together through the Fediverse.

I totally get that. I watched in real time when MS tried to kill Netscape by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and used their “embrace and extend” business model to try to reserve the web for their proprietary browser. Ot didn’t work, but there was a lot of pushback both legally and socially.

I think that we don’t have to worry about MS coming in for a while. I am interested to see how Facebook makes things work if and when they integrate Threads, but afaik no one is in an analogous position in terms of making a commercial, reddit-like experience tied to the fediverse.

I mean, reddit’s model isn’t that great. They filed for an IPO on Dec 21 for $15B and since then have been marked down to about $5B, and that was before the APIpocalypse. That means that a) all of the current institutional and VC investors lost about 2/3 of their money and that spez and company have similarly seen their ineptitude slash their dreams of Musk-like wealth, and b) value-wise, they’re heading back to 2019 when they were smaller. It’s a terrible time for them to try doing an IPO. The fact that they haven’t pulled it makes it feel like they know the game of musical chairs is winding up and they just want to get out with even a quarter of what they expected.