Because they have no basis on which to decide where to go. It’s like buying toothpaste but there are hundreds of options, none of which you know anything about, so you get whichever seems most popular. It minimises the risk of ending up with something which is unpopular for good reasons.
Something that would make it massively easier is portable/decentralised identities, or at least easy account migration. This should go for communities as well so that a community can exist independently of an instance, or be migrated to another instance with subscribers being redirected seamlessly.
That is why you would want to choose an instance that aligns with your values, so that if they defederate, it is to your benefit.
Open Collective is a funding platform unaffiliated with l.w
I don’t know if this is the same question worded differently, but I’m unclear about what is supposed to be synced when a community gets federated.
Let’s say I’m the first one on my instance to sub to a community on another instance. At first it is of course empty because it hasn’t been federated, but after a few moments the posts, old and new, start to show up. However, existing votes and comments appear to not get pulled in - only new ones created after the moment the community was initially federated.
Naturally, I don’t expect votes, posts or comments from blocked users or instances to sync. But the rest should be IMO - at least lazily (e.g. only when you visit a post do comments and votes on it get pulled in).
Edit: it seems that comments and votes do sync after a while, but I can’t verify that it’s complete (though I assume it is).
At the very least it doesn’t handle spoilers correctly