Any service where you viewing ads is the actual product is the same. YouTube reliably will serve me up recommended videos with titles like “dumb lib-slammed!” or “pwning liberals at the library” or other random things. I never watch them and am confused why they keep sending them my way. The stuff being foisted on people is just toxic.

I deleted twitter ages ago but never jumped to Mastadon because the initial descriptions seemed overly technical and confusing. Like people went out of their way to describe how it was different and unique, making it sound difficult. It was only after the Reddit debacle and trying out Lemmy did I realize it was basically the same thing to an average user. I could get my content drip without specialized knowledge. That makes me consider trying out Mastadon.

I think most people don’t care how they get their memes, just that they get them. That should be the focus, and learning about federated systems is a byproduct.

Enforcement is hard and expensive. I’d bet it’s a question of weighing the cost-benefit of pouring resources into enforcement vs letting them peter-out and diminish over time.