In my eyes, the only sensible way of building such a platform at scale is having it be federated. Otherwise you can host a server - and if you’re unlucky, might need accounts on five servers to access all the groups you want.

If their federation implementation comes relatively prompt and is workable, that’s great. If not, it feels like a way to bootstrap a centralised alternative to discord. Pre-enshitification discord, but it’d again be up to a single entity whether it stays that way.

I don’t mind paying for hosting, but I don’t want to jump from one centralised platform to the next.