It’s not confusing. People just have different ideas about what the experience should be
No they’re not confused. I’ve seen a lot of these discussions on Mastodon. They don’t misunderstand the tech, they’re actively trying to curate a community.
Exactly. There’s a core disagreement about whether making a public post means consenting to it being used for all purposes without consent (the multiple battles about consent-based search), but relatively few people are confused about whether bad actors will use it without consent.
But public posts federating across the network isn’t an “experience”. It’s the basic functionality of the network.