Same reason people fanboy over anything. They have made a personal investment in something, be it time or money, and are now trying to justify it by saying everything else is trash.
Then this gets reinforced by their bubble and more and more extreme opinions form. Reasonable people don’t behave this way.
I’m actually quite a bit younger than that. I was very much into stocks but got scammed in the GME fiasco when they disabled the buy button and got into Monero (at least I know beforehand that crypto is manipulated as fuck). Monero lead to FOSS and now I run a xmr node, i2p node, lemmy instance, selfhost cool stuff, etc. I learned a lot of stuff this way.
My home instance requires you to submit proof that you are human by either posting on an existing social media account or anonymously by sending 0.01 XMR (about 1.5€), that system is really hard to game (i guess you could spend a bunch of money on accounts but those would get banned and the funds would just pay for hosting lol).
I mean vanced. I was too lazy to set up revanced and instead tried out NewPipe. I hate how I don’t have my really optimized suggested page on NewPipe but I get around that by using vanced to browse and then opening the video in NewPipe via the share button. A nice plus of NewPipe however is how my subscriptions now really are just the channels I really care about and not the 1000 random ones I’ve subbed to over the last few years.
No, defederating would block all flow between instances. The problem is with hosting content that you don’t want to or arent allowed to host. Currently if I view a image from burggit, the image gets saved to the monero.town and then served whenever someone else views it from there, which is a problem. If instead every time someone wants to view that image, it gets pulled from burggit again, monero.town isn’t in trouble for hosting it anymore.