Here's the thing. Most people into the federated alternatives aren't really going to the old place any more. I mean I'll admit I've been taking a look at r/place every now and then. But otherwise I'm not engaging with my usual haunts there. That's why there's not so many people to make a big impact on the canvas for any of the federated projects.
However there are still a lot of people still active that are unhappy with spez and his activities. Which explains why that message has a lot more traction there.
From time to time reddit does a community project, where you have a canvas of 1000x1000 px and every user can set the color of a single pixel with a cooldown period of 5 minutes.
I believe it had the origin in a legend that some guy in the old web sold ad space on a 1000x1000 px canvas for 1$ per pixel and got rich with it.