You need a certain amount of reddit karma to make a subreddit IIRC. You can farm it, but it's yet another thing unrelated to working on your project you need to do, plus it takes time (could take days).

The whole process is opaque too, it feels distinctly like "we have arbitrarily bestowed upon you the privilege of operating subreddits... for now".

I like the reddit format so I've tried this option myself.