…is Discord trying to do federation? I’m confused.

Someone is in charge of Revolt, doesn’t matter if it’s a company or someone else. Someone is in charge of the servers. What’s stopping them from ultimately selling the company? Reddit didn’t start out as a corporation. Nor did WhatsApp, but after creating a trusted userbase they were sold off to Facebook to be exploited for data.

IT people love to talk about how “easy” it is to create and run your own server, but this is simply not true and they just lack awareness.