article (probably paywalled), archive
Part of it was that execs found out and didn't find value in running an instance while shouldering the legal and reputational risk, privacy responsibility, etc. and it sounds like the company wanted this department's journalists to focus on their writing lmao. The authors also seem to not have wanted to deal with content moderation or the legal risks in that either.
The authors also mentioned that to support a fediverse community they'd need to make improvements to the reliability of the site:
Responsible ownership of a social media network necessitates daily backups, layer caching, downtime monitoring, load balancing, and a bunch of techy stuff that probably wouldn’t trouble a person who doesn’t own a social media network.
I wonder how many current large instances are running into these problems of risk and tech debt, even without the management pressure of a renowned news organization .
