New folks on the Mastodon seem to be surprised when, after a day or two, no one has been a gratuitous dick to them. It's one of the beauties of the federated structure that gratuitous dicks get reported to their admins. Servers ban their habitual dicks. Those servers that don't ban their gratuitous dicks get blocked by the rest.
Servers that get blocked off by too many others, lose users to other servers that are still well-connected.
This is the immune system of the Fediverse acting to isolate and exclude bad actors.
For a good example of this in action, did you hear about the time the alt-right social media platform Gab set up a Mastodon instance and was instantly the largest site in the Fediverse? They're not around anymore. The how and why is an interesting story. See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZoASOyfvGQ
Decentralized Social Networks vs the Trolls
Note: since publishing this video, I've spoken with various Black fediverse moderators and users, and many say that the Fediverse doesn't give them sufficien...YouTube