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.
Think of it this way, a company creates an instance (kbin or lemmy). Then they create a community for each of their products (someone mentioned blizzard creating a community for wow). Now, they have this official place for people to talk and the company can monitor it. This means if someone has problems, they can jump in and help them resolve it.
It also means that a company could delete the same posts they don’t like, but it’s the fediverse, so Blizzard’s WOW community isn’t the only WOW community. Once they start pulling this shit, their reputation will be pulled down on the other communities.
So, they can delete the spam posts that pollute the community (good), and work with people to take care of problems (good). They could also delete the posts of people who are having problems (bad), but once this happens it would be noticed and posted about elsewhere.
They also don’t need to allow account creation (if they choose to go that route). They could create accounts for employees, but customers would use their existing fediverse account.