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.

I find this a very interesting idea! This could also be done by large NGOs and orgs such as UNESCO, Doctors without borders, WWF etc., which would be more in the spirit of the Fediverse.

I'd rather not have giant corporations run instances. I like the Fediverse because it feels independent and user controlled.

But, it's all decentralized so I can easily just block it and never have to deal with it.

It would be cool for official game forums to adopt the fediverse, it would open them up to a bigger social media world.

Such a good idea then it would be easy to avoid them ;)

Back in the day, gamers joined official forums to talk but they were censored there. That's why they came to Reddit and why companies didn't want to deal with the malcontents who dwelt there.

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.

I'd love this if only to stop the current move to Discord. Moving from forums to a centralized, closed, unsearchable chat system is the worst that's happened to online communities in a long time.

I think this is closer to federated Discourse rather than phpBB. Not sure if federation is worth it for forums though.