What I’m imagining is that someone running a project (like a game studio for example) creates an instance of PieFed or Lemmy or whatever, disables sign-ups, creates community(-ies) for their project(s), and lets people post there.
It would not only allow people to interact without having to create new accounts, but could also help spread awareness of their project.
So I wonder (a) is this possible (b) are the any downsides I’m not aware of.
The only downside would be occasional inter-instance drama and the need to update the federation blocklist occasionally. This could be avoided by using an allowlist (instead of a blocklist) and only federating with a handful of well-run instances.
At this point if you only federated with lemmy.world and no other instances you’d be getting 90% of the benefits of federation and 10% of the problems.
Any entity, which would try to make an official instance, should it federate only with e.g. .world, will be bullied out of the Threadiverse.
A relatively open federation, with its choice of providers, is the network’s main defence against enshittification. Reddit was open source too, but as a silo it was able to lock everything down and decay.