No.470643
FB was less bad at one point, never vibrant, and always shit.
Criminals around you? If that was the worst thing about Fediverse, I wouldn't be bothered by it.
There are plenty of third party forums that are fine.
fbi.gov fucking sucks, I'd take ordinary forums over disc any day. It's not the absolute worst thing, but it's like a shittier, overly-centralized version of what chat was like 15 years ago, and it's rife with the same kind of little-despot walled-garden mentalities which make reddit so awful.
If you're actually into more freeform stuff, try spacehey. It's a clone of oldstyle myspace, with a couple limitations on the code you can use, but not very many. You can add whoever you want, find new music, it's got IM, boards, user HTML, the whole 9 yards.
This seems like more of a /b/ thread, but I'm not the boss of you!