I doubt any project will want to put a canonical link going to a website they don't own, as it would reduce their "google power".
If I'm not mistaken, sites are penalized in terms of SEO ranking for posting duplicate content and not specifying it the canonical link. Once most Hive frontends are setting the proper canonical, it will be clear to search engines which version is the true canonical. Therefore versions that don't specify canonical and are not the true canonical might be penalized.
This is somewhat speculation, but I'd be surprised if Google doesn't do something similar.
I would side with your speculation.