Use Fediverse/ActivityPub, XMPP (maybe matrix), IRC. Use protocols, not "apps"/"platforms". Stop using corporate-owned centralized services. Well, unless you like being the subject of exploitation and manipulation of course.
This means that the only people you will encounter in protocols will be privacy freak type nerds and “normal” people you might actually feel better interacting with or watching are on popular apps.
But yeah if the normal people are where all the ads and spam and nazis are, I'm fine being a weirdo :)
I think it's really that highly motivated individuals will power through garbage UX that regular users won't. Upsides like decentralization are abstract, UX is concrete. You need to get the UX right to give your real benefits a chance to shine.
Fediverse, in my actual experience, is overwhelmingly filled with hyper left leaning echo chamber content that I’m not interested in.
I've been using mastodon for nearly 10 years. Fediverse, in my actual experience, is overwhelmingly a really good place to meet and chat with interesting, friendly people. Follow and engage with cool people and you'll have a good time. If you go looking for what you don't like, you'll find it, because it's there just like anywhere on the net. The difference is you don't have to see stuff you don't want to see, because the software and protocol have features that allow this. I'm on a pretty small server and we all are pretty much on the same page about what we expect our social interactions to be like. You know you can just filter out content, right? Your server can totally block or defederate from servers that have objectionable content, too (by whatever your collective definition of "objectionable" is). It works pretty well if you use it the way it's designed to be used.