in regards to that definition then: yeah, I’d say people are, on the whole, more enlightened than they were a century ago. the scientific method is more thoroughly accepted/baked in at a societal level, and the mass adoption of digital communication facilitates a greater sense of community… though the resulting communities are often at odds with each other.
it seems like one of the key defining principals of the fediverse is platform evolution - mastodon, bluesky, and lemmy are just going to be footnotes in history.