That’s definitely an ideal benefit of decentralization, but as the OP correctly pointed out, the reality often works out differently than the ideal.

I don’t think most customers really care about their privacy.

I’m not entirely sure Apple is way too much better. They still mine a ton of days from you, they might just not sell as much as blatantly as Google.

But what percentage of their userbase wants to use them for domains. I’m sure it was profitable, but I doubt they were making as much on that as they could elsewhere. A service making them $50 million a year might not be enough for them to decide to continue with it when they are regularly dealing with products that make hundreds of millions or even billions from. It might just not be worth the effort.

they took what was almost certainly a profitable service and abandoned it

They oftentimes make a decision like this when their internal math tells them that the resources they put into domains could make them more money if they were put in another product. If you consider the opportunity cost, it could make sense to Google to make a change like this.

From our perspective, it’s crazy, but it’s easy to forget the huge scale of the money they are dealing with.

services like Gmail and Maps which can’t be profitable

They aren’t profitable, neither is Photos, but they are considered essential applications that keep users bought into the google ecosystem and are necessary for android to remain competitive.

You are absolutely right with your description. One thing to note since OP was looking for the distinction: most mods are power users. It’s usually the most active and enthusiastic users who have the desire to become a moderator.

No i think they do get it, it’s exactly like how subreddits work, if you don’t like how /r/technology works, you can always create a new tech based subreddit moderated anyway you like. The issue isnt that there are multiple communities.

The problem, as always, is discoverability of all of these disjointed communities. I’m still new to Lemmy, but it seems like you have to rely on an external 3rd party tool like https://browse.feddit.de/ to find any of them. (please correct me if there is a better way I just haven’t found yet!)