I think this is the biggest reason. A huge amount of content on reddit is astroturfing / brand manipulation; both in posts and in the comments. And in addition to that, a there’s a huge amount of ‘karma farming’, where heaps of popular but low-effort content is recycled over and over again to gain points and create a sense of credibility for accounts that will later be used for marketing / manipulation.
Federation is just complicated enough to keep the dummies out. Also probably defederating the idiot instances and better content moderation.
Not only that, but the community is small enough that large corporations and marketing companies don’t care about it. Yet ;)
I think this is the biggest reason. A huge amount of content on reddit is astroturfing / brand manipulation; both in posts and in the comments. And in addition to that, a there’s a huge amount of ‘karma farming’, where heaps of popular but low-effort content is recycled over and over again to gain points and create a sense of credibility for accounts that will later be used for marketing / manipulation.