It is interesting how people get different results. My process has been to simply block a user or instance when it’s obvious nothing from there will ever be interesting to me. I haven’t had to do that a lot though, and I don’t see any of what you suggest. Then again, while I see mostly Lemmy content, I use Mbin, so perhaps that’s part of it as well. Some instances might preblock better than others.

I do think the learning curve is higher than traditional social media. Not that it’s hard, but the average person wants a plug and play without having to do anything. The caveat of having a preset curation of “safe” feed is that most people don’t explore past that, and it’s the random stuff that wanders in that makes things more interesting.