Lemmy didn’t try to force me to dox myself for “age verification”.

There seems to be a misunderstanding. There is no central moderation here, merely what individual people will put up with, and what they won’t. If, for example, one community decides they won’t tolerate strawmanning and sealioning, they can show anyone who does those things the door. But, unlike Twitter, you cannot be entirely banned off the platform, because there’s always the option to spin up your own instance and federate with other instances willing to do so.

I realised long ago that the human brain is not capable of handling everything that’s happening all around the world, all the time. I’m selective about what media I consume and I make extensive use of blocklists for things that aren’t my fight.

As others have said, the best way to do this is to use a platform that has good block list features (most Fediverse platforms qualify), and then curate your block list. You can block users, communities, and instances you don’t wish to see here on Lemmy. Mastodon might be for you, because you can also block keywords (Mastodon and Lemmy will happily talk to each other, so you can subscribe to Lemmy communities from a normal Mastodon account and post simply by mentioning the community, or comment by replying to an existing post).