I know they aren't? The person hinted at something but didn't say anything concrete, so I don't actually know what they're saying, which is why I asked them to clarify.

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.