Facebook didnt buy the entirety of VR either. But they did fracture the userbase and if you cant spend so much on VR you’re stuck buying into metas walled garden now (Reverb lacks fundamental features) This sorta ground is what Meta is going to go for. They are going to target the largest, most manipulatable audience (which is a lot on here) and swallow them
Remember how Facebook bought Oculus and people thought it was gunna be great because VR was finally getting really strong financial backing but they ended up just making their own VR walled garden that requires you to sign in with a facebook account and you are only able to selectively play with PCVR players if they allow it on their app store?
Most of Reddits alternatives from when they did crap in the past were typically flooded with extremists, racists, etc because the offshoot platforms had the goal of being an absolute free speech platform and only banning for illegal stuff. If there was a big enough influx of normal people then it would typically start to balance out. IIRC a lot of those alternatives had creators that were err…more politically motivated individuals but they typically stuck to their guns about having a completely open and free speech platform for better and for worse. I like the Federated approach to this because that basically means you can set your instance up however you want, and if the direction that instance goes is not the way others want well you can defederate from them and have your own little federation/blob of like minded instances and this goes the other way too as if you dont like what another instance is doing you can defederate from it yourself. At least thats what I understand
TIL these are even a thing