I want this to happen, and then all of the admins join together to block API requests from the Reddit instance and redirect to pay-per-use API gateway.

That's basically what Facebook is doing with Mastodon at the moment. And I think the consensus is that nobody wants to federate with Facebook.

He likely couldn't "just" do it. The synchronization overhead for federation is large, and with the amount of data Reddit has, you'd have to put a lot of effort into writing efficient code to handle that. Or pay for a lot of servers doing it.

BTW, it would be interesting to see whether current lemmy codebase could handle it as well…

He could, but wouldn't.

But in terms of practicality, you also need to look at the fact that large organisations are full of bureaucracy, I believe there are 200 people working on the Android app for Reddit and it's relatively terrible, whereby the development of Sync was handled by a single person and it was light-years ahead.

Using that as a benchmark, it would take them years before they were able to integrate with us.

A reddit instance is conceivable, but the magic of the federation is that no one instance has control. Reddit has control of every subreddit, and they'd lose that control joining the federation. Likewise, there's no financial gain from having an instance.

If Fediverse is successful and reddit continues its descent then I can see it in 5-10 years, similar to how Digg tried to reimagine itself to stay relevant.

A reddit instance is conceivable, but the magic of the federation is that no one instance has control. Reddit has control of every subreddit, and they'd lose that control joining the federation. Likewise, there's no financial gain from having an instance.

That'd be pretty cool but would take a lot of development time and probably wouldn't work with their stupid features like messaging and NFT scams