You should still consider using an activitypub platform. I know mastodon has a decidedly lower quality of user, but I use a gnusocial instance and I have lots of interesting conversations.

Now, there's degenerates there too, but they're not quite so irritating and there are lots of tuning controls to play with.

Honestly, using anything other than large, centralized social media will be a boon to the world, imho. I don't want to be a farm animal, just creating more data for an advertising company. I want to talk to people.

There are other interesting implementations too. Pleroma comes to mind, it's an elixir activitypub server.

Or maybe you could write your own. Or fork one.

Idk.

But don't let the mastoverse disenchant you from federated Internet content.