The existence of the article you're literally commenting on directly refutes what you're saying here. Like you're in a thread because of news that demonstrates that the opposite of what you're saying here is actually true.
If you need more examples - What happened to Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal? They got banned by congress right? They got shut down? The government stopped them from continuing to manipulate the public?
Big agree with this. One of the clients I messed with had a feature like this and it's really nice. But we need something server-side to allow federated communities to pull from each other to create a river from separate streams as it were.
I follow lots of the the same communities across instances and that means often I'm seeing repeated posts, sometimes from different authors just to get the aggregate of things. This would be a huge boon to the usability too.