Alot of words to reach conclusions already often arrived at over the past few years, but ok. Many realized Fediverse isn't it and moved on, but also fine for some to still congregate around their respective instances and communities and have their space too. Small/indie web etc etc. It's just not the broad social network some might have been looking for beyond X. That being said no "direct experience using Twitter" raises how OP has any real insights into this at all really. Also avoiding Bluesky or saying ATProto kind of a big hole here, but at least mentioned as maybe possibility and that's not the main subject of the post. Carry on.

> Since Reddit itself is entirely text-based, it remains accessible and efficient, and appending site:reddit.com is still the best way to make Google search queries return anything approaching useful.

This is nonsense, trivially proven by looking up literally anything you actually understand. Everything is tired, stupid memes, outright incorrect information, or 16 year olds pretending to authoritatively give recommendations on things they don’t know anything about.

The only people who still think Reddit has particularly useful information or the people still most susceptible to not understanding misinformation in the first place.

And that’s to say nothing about the clear prevalence of bots and AI on any sub with more than 20 people.

> On Facebook, I am beholden to the whims of men in suits who have gleefully incinerated the mental and emotional stability of billions of people for the sake of making money.

Sorry what? Facebook/meta has a very diverse employee population, and very influential diversity groups.

People of all kinds (men, women, lgbtiq+, binary and non-binary people) dressed in all kinds of way have contributed to “ gleefully incinerating the mental and emotional stability of billions of people for the sake of making money”