I agree with you, but let's be honest. It doesn't help that the Fediverse is implemented mainly as cheap imitations of better-known, corporate-owned platforms. IIRC, Diaspora* was founded with the explicit aim of out-Facebooking Facebook while being decentralized/federated. GNUsocial, Mastodon, Pleroma, etc. all want to out-Twitter Twitter while being decentralized/federated.
But the fundamental problem is that nerds for whom high school (and possibly college/university) were miserable experiences are building platforms that turn the internet into a global high school cafeteria.
Agreed, too. Sadly, I don't think there's an easy way out of this situation. I do think one of the most important and often overlooked factors for a positive change is increased computer literacy among the population. Computer literacy as in "how to make your machine do what you want", not as in "how to select options in program/service X", which is what computer literacy seems to mean nowadays.