And there’s not much point dumping them into Boston harbour.

The importer pays it, not the foreign company.

It seems that this might be useful to add to this pile of information:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921

The Mastodon project put a lot of energy into a high quality plushy.

I got one for my wife last Christmas, but our 19-year-old daughter countermanded it, and has something like 15000 hours logged, while maintaining a near-perfect GPA.

So apparently it works.