Marcie Dietrich is a user on octodon.social. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse. If you don't, you can sign up here.

Still trying to figure this place out. Just did a search for 'atheist' to try to find like-minded people to follow and found one of my exes. That wasn't weird at all. Nope.

Taking this post as an example of a larger problem. It says you were looking for "like-minded people to follow". It is not the first post which says that.
That is the problem with so-called "social networks", that we all try to follow like-minded people. The result is tunnel vision and clan mentality. We also need to read people who are not like-minded from time to time.
Of course we will dislike what they write, but that's life.
@feb2772