My main reason was that the NGI Forward project wants this:
“Interoperability” probably means just a link from ngi.eu, and choosing similar colors. But I’d consider it weird and not smooth if that link goes to (say) edgeryders.eu/c/ngi-forward and then users find a truckload of other, unrelated information on edgeryders.eu.
Still possible by cross-site @mentions and a content cross-propagation plugin displaying in the footer. But serendipitous content discovery by users would likely suffer …
Again possible by cross-site @mentions. But it forces users to understand how they can be referenced from a site they never visited. So the confusion would be moved from the point of arrival to the federated platform to this point of discovering the other parts of the federation …
When the project ends, yes, totally. We’ll import over all the content of “our” federated Discourse sites into the main site when they fold up. I even think we should even put that into a contract template that we’ll use for other whitelabel clients such as Trust in Play and Timisoara: that the public content has to come with a CC-BY licence and that we may archive it incl. all metadata on edgeryders.eu if and when they want to close down their whitelabel site.
So, hmm. A federation setup has its own technical complexities, and avoiding it for these two projects is certainly less work on the tech side. So if we don’t have to host the POPREBEL and NGI Forward content on their own domains, maybe it’s better not to? We could take our time to get the multisite setup “right” in smaller projects like Trust in Play, Biofabforum and (if Hugi wants to migrate) Blivande.
Anyway, still interested in other opinions. The advantage of a federated setup is “more freedom”, of course: everything we customized on edgeryders.eu can be customized differently.