Universities might want to locally host a mirror in order to waste less bandwidth and provide faster downloads;
Large companies usually like to host internal mirrors for the same reasons as above and also so they can audit and pick what packages will be available for their end users;
The question here isn’t “why would you” but rather “why would I be unable to do it”. Their actively gatekeeping their repository in a futile attempt to be the single and central point of flatpak distribution - much like what Apple does with the App Store.
Flatpaks are not centralized, Flathub is. You can have your own repo.
Yeah sure, just try to mirror Flathub into your repo.
I don’t get it. Why would you store all of it? I mean, you can but… why?
Because…
For what’s worth Debian archive repositories are about 5 TB and people actively mirror then in universities, companies, cloud providers etc.
The question here isn’t “why would you” but rather “why would I be unable to do it”. Their actively gatekeeping their repository in a futile attempt to be the single and central point of flatpak distribution - much like what Apple does with the App Store.
You can but there would be little point. Fedora has its own repo for instance.