It’s not about the ads on Google.com, but the ads on the SEO sites themselves, those are also served by Google. Ever heard of DoubleClick? That’s also Google. If Google Search would give you good clean non-commercial sites without ads, they would lose money.
It’s much simpler than that. Google is an ad company, not a search company. SEO spam gives them ad clicks just the same as quality content, if not more so. As long as they don’t became bad enough that everybody switches to the competition, they simply don’t have to care.
What I find even more mind boggling is that despite all that tracking, advertising still misses the mark by a mile. I regularly see the same ad repeated 10 times in a row while also being completely irrelevant to me. Meanwhile I also frequently miss stuff that would be relevant for me and that should be covered by ads (e.g. movie releases, I might pick up the first trailer, but completely miss when the movie actually hits cinemas).
For the money and effort spend on ads you’d think they could do a lot better than what they are.
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Lemmy is not a “free speech” platform, unlike Voat. It can be moderated. Offending instances in the Fediverse can be blocked and all that stuff. As long as the moderators do their job, they can filter everything they want to filter, just like Reddit.
The more interesting question with Lemmy is if the federation will actual have any advantage in the long run, as cutting other instances off is the easiest way to moderate them. Which than in turn means the users have to hop between server, which is annoying and will in turn will lead to more centralization again.
For the time being I see Lemmy not as “The Solution™”, but more as a “not-Reddit”. It can and will run into all the problems as ever other Web forum will.
And the real strength of Reddit isn’t the huge subreddits anyway, they are mostly just trash. It’s all the niche communities, most of them haven’t moved away, or if they have, they moved to Discord.