There must be another way, one where we can stay online without being trapped in toxic social networks
The internet is decentralized, which is another way to say lacking in meta-incentive capabilities (e.g. cannot resist incentives for long, unable to influence or modify the set of incentives being applied to it), which means it will always fall prey to the dumbest race-to-the-bottom traps.
I don't think theres a way to end toxicity and spam in social networks without also ending anonymity.
RSS, Email, Signal, iMessages and RCS, AT Protocol and Mastodon. What else does one need? Feature complete.