The instance I'm on is definitely smaller in scale and thus calls for a different approach to social media. It definitely feels like the old school forum days where you end up recognising usenames, I wouldn't be surprised if a year down the line we end up setting up an irl meeting between active members.

On the other hand, it's definitely hard to break bad habits, and having been on reddit for years, I still find myself having to fight some learned behaviour (doom scrolling, opening the app when I just closed it seconds ago, wanting to post a snarky comment to someone who's clearly wrong instead of trying to be nice and explanatory...)

I wouldn't say that leaving centralised platforms for the fediverse is a "lesser evil", because the fediverse is what you make of it, you still have some control if you're techy enough. But I do think it take extra voluntary self change to have a better approach to social media, and the fediverse isn't a solution to that in itself.