In my experience, there has been a very minimal amount of hate speech on my timeline.
The nature of the decentralized, federated system does allow hate groups to easily gain a platform. However it's just as easy, if not easier to prevent their instance from communicating with yours.
It's very much NOT like the torrent analogy you made and a lot more in line with your Reddit analogy.
I would encourage you to go to https://mastodon.online and check it out!