A basic awareness test is built into the fediverse, you have to choose an instance to sign up on in order to create an account and participate. This filters out everyone whose intellectual capacity doesn’t go further than tapping “install” in their smartphone’s app store.

I prefer quality over quantity. Spammers, advertisers, “influencers”, brainless users consumers who can’t tell the difference between an “app” and a website, and other “mainstream” phenomena can stay in their corporate internet cesspits. Their absence alone makes a platform a lot more pleasant to use.