Unfortunately, the current state of the patent office is extremely understaffed and mostly nontechnical. So, there’s not enough qualified examiners to examine patents, not just in software, but medical devices, voting machines, and lots of other industries. So essentially if a patent is submitted by a major company, it just gets rubber stamped. And it’s up to the courts to sort it out. Unfortunately that sorting out is biased and understaffed, too, so usually the initial case will go to the patent holder by default and it’s not until an appeal or two on those biases and technical misinterpretations that it can be invalidated. So it’s rare for a smaller company to be able to spend that much money to invalidate an obvious idea like this. Of course this is by design to give large corporations an unfair advantage. If they want some tech, they just sue for a stupid patent, wait until the company either folds and then they can steal it legally, or goes bankrupt fighting it and they can acquire them hostilely.
X is a right-wing propaganda platform now. Bluesky is not a good alternative though. It’s just as controlled and toxic as X was just before Elan bought it and will eventually become what X is now when a major corporation or rich person decides to grab it or it goes public. The federation functionality is just for show and marketing. I wish people would stop just jumping when platforms become truly horrible and then jumping to something that will be made as horrible very easily after it becomes popular enough.