I suspect Mastodon.social has made a big mistake (as in big is part of the problem) by making themselves the default server with open sign ups. They might as well have hung a "trolls enter here" welcome sign out. Moderating well at scale is hard and requires a lot of human effort, it's going to be an instance full of newbies who will be encountering trolls while not understanding how the fediverse works and who have a client mentality (let me speak to the manager!).

I suspect the fediverse really would be better served by slow growth on it's own prosocial path than trying to compete with platforms run by antisocial billionaires. We're not competing for customers, those number metrics aren't important, it needs to be quality over quantity and thinking of fediversians as citizens not clients. I know that's a hard mindset for some people, especially people who have had to work in corporate environments, to let go of but it's essential to let it go to be truly able to build prosocial things (not all competition is bad, of course, but the corporate kind is). It's always important to think about whether we're being treated like a citizen/person or a client/product (whether it's by our governments, a healthcare professional, and in terms of technological tools). Do you belong or are you being used while you're profitable? And is someone trying to confuse you about which is which so you can't tell? (The latter means you're actively being conned.)