Why?

I want to run a television community. So I do. Can’t do that under your system.

And in the Lemmy/Piefed’s case, people can just spin up alternative instances - so it really isn’t like Reddit in that sense.

Because Reddit was (is), and people wanted alternatives to Reddit. People tend to like the community-based system, in many cases because they themselves have interests they want to promote via that system. I do. There’s plenty of services that exists that are effectively just profile posting.

Yes, it would. If you are a community mod, and you delete a comment from someone else who is off-instance, that deletion federates.

Lots of people come on here to build communities. You imagine a system where communities don’t exist at all and all posts are essentially just profile posts, purely moderated by the profile owner.

Yes, because that’s essentially what Lemmy is - designed to be a federated version of Reddit. What you are suggesting is something that would in practice function entirely different to this place entirely.

The only reason we do it this way, on Lemmy and Reddit, with centralized moderation of communities, under centralized control of the whole system, is because it makes it easier to censor. I’m serious.

It’s also because the design of Reddit/Lemmy is community-driven and not user-post on profile driven. We post to communities, not profiles. People subscribe to communities and browse the posts within them.