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 always thought one of the benefits of having the community hosted by a third party was the ability of the users to be honest.
Several subreddits went through significant drama when the negative posts were suppressed by the companies that held mod positions. This leads to less community engagement and less trust.
A WoW community hosted by Blizzard, particularly on Lemmy, might be seen as less open and honest.
To be fair, nothing stops an unofficial community unrelated to those companies to be created as well, lemmy just gives companies the option of creating their own official one.