Hear me out… I’ve lurked on reddit for 14 years.
At the beginning, many companies were aware of unofficial communities about their products, but didn’t touch reddit with a ten foot pole, but as reddit became more mainstream and some companies started monitoring unofficial reddit communities to provide customer support and interact with the community, some even embraced reddit and declared the subreddits “official”.
I imagine that some of the early reluctance derived from them having to rely on reddit to host their community. (and now we see how much reddit is trustworthy, also at the time reddit was on the “news” only for the worst reasons)
But now they have the chance, given that lemmy and other reddit alternatives have captured some internet buzz, to adhere to Lemmy and spin their own instances and host their communities.
This would help bring more instances into the fediverse by companies who can bill it to their marketing and community budgets.
I would love to see:
We have looped around and we are back to vBulleting and phpBB times. But this time it’s federated.
I can definitely see why companies would be interested in this. Near total control of content and the resources behind them? Don’t have to worry about being tied to bad publicity of a specific platform?
Of course this is wide open for them to abuse this by restricting content to only what they want, but the nice thing about the fediverse is that it would likely just be one of many resources for content on that topic.
I don’t see many people wanting to create their accounts with such an instance, but definitely could be nice as an “official” source of news. Could one day likely replace official forums on company sites as it essentially fills the same use case but is federated so its content reaches larger audiences.