Did they license it? The CW blog post was vague on that, though they did call out that they “did not work with Apple on this tool”.

I’d have thought that if some money exchanged hands that Apple would have also had their help in development.

In general, trying to get my kids to actually do something. Sometimes I go out and eat tacos.

99.99% don’t really want or understand a federated system. How do you know it’s not hosted on someone’s desktop over DSL? How do you know it will be there tomorrow? How do you know they aren’t modifying the code to do something nefarious?

As long as there’s a “main” instance people will prioritize that.

Won’t matter. Based on recent behavior I’d expect any reasonably large sub to be forcibly reopened by the admins after a couple days. If the current mods won’t cooperate then they’ll be replaced by the hordes who want to go on a power-trip.