Because as we learned in our lemmy growing pains, large-scale federation is a challenge that requires a fairly concerted effort and then doesn’t always succeed very well.

People still (rightly) have tons of complaints about lemmy failing to do things as well as reddit did. It has some huge upsides (no center ownership) but it’s a challenge. Now imagine the much-smaller userbase. I knew everyone in the topics I frequented back in my forum days because there were that few people.