So is the idea that a community coalesces to a winner-takes-all single server, or is there a way to… uh … federate (?) … same-theme communities from different servers?

Microsoft wants to own tools crucial to the mainstream of software development. They also want to own the cloud infrastructure on which those tools depend. Today, they might lose dimes on every LLM call. In five years, they’ll make a penny on orders of magnitude more calls. Microsoft has many flaws, including cloud capacity, but they aren’t short-sighted about investment. (I used to work in DevDiv and Azure Machine Learning.)