The More Time Passes, the Better Our Advice on Social Control Media Seems
Outsourcing does not work, even if it temporarily seems cheaper or a worthwhile tradeoff
Twitter is pretty much dead and the latest experimental business model is blackmail. This won't end well. Hosting videos praising Hitler and spreading nazi-type propaganda may have impressed a sitting president, but that's no longer applicable (after a "break-up").
Put aside Twitter; yesterday we saw people complaining about fake friends and LLM slop in Facebook. They explained why they had distanced themselves from that site or stopped posting there altogether.
Mastodon?
Well, Mastodon is sort of collapsing on its own or imploding (sooner or later people realise it does not tackle the key issues [1, 2]). If everyone hosted their own Mastodon (or Pleroma etc.) instance, then you're just reinventing the wheel. It's called RSS.
As for YouTube? This past week there were articles about the crisis of slop in that platform. It not on increases Google's bills (storage and more), it's ruining the experience for legitimate users. It's now reported by several vloggers that Google began censoring/hiding YouTube videos that merely explain to people how to self-host!
At the end of the day, any platform you do not control yourself is working for someone else. Over time more people will understand this rather banal point. █