> Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance.
I have yet to see a single federated system that has demonstrated commercial success. There's no reason to believe that strategy would result in greater success than Facebook's usual playbook, which is proven.
The world wide web used to have a host of proprietary servers for it, but those for the most part got eaten by Apache (which latter renamed to Apache Http Server). And then a host of new open-source http servers and libraries.
Sometimes what's good for markets & the world doesn't have to be owned & commercial. Sometimes the availability of resources such as info-resources like httpd can beget enormous commercial success while themselves not having much commercial success.
A Tim O'Reilly saying comes to mind: create more value than you capture. In some cases, without setting free the core idea & letting people run wild, you'll never stand a chance of capturing any value what-so-ever.
I have yet to see a single federated system that has demonstrated commercial success. There's no reason to believe that strategy would result in greater success than Facebook's usual playbook, which is proven.