use corporate brand recognition and raw capital to get lots of users onto your instance of the federated thing
lots and lots and lots of users
“realize” that most of your users are only talking to each other, and maybe less than 10% is happening over federation
(of course they are, you deployed all those resources to get as many users as possible)
feel free to make things hard for the rest of the network along the way by being generally unstable for federated instances, since you represent such a huge number of users the rest of the network will cater to your broken nonsense
leave federated network, citing “technical challenges” and aforementioned mostly-local-posting, causing everyone not on your instance to just mysteriously stop posting from the perspective of most users who aren’t keeping up with what seems like a bunch of nerd drama
this is, in essence, what happened to XMPP with Google
this is, in essence, what happened to XMPP with Google