It seems that you've struck a nerve with a number of our patrons here and understandably so.
The centralized platforms that you listed all share a common business model. To power their websites, apps, and APIs, these companies have to purchase enormous amounts of computing and storage from datacenters. They also have to then pay huge, ongoing electricity and internet bills to continue delivering content to us. In addition, they have to employ armies of IT staff, programmers, UX/UI designers, product managers, support staff, business administration professionals, accountants, marketers, and so on. Needless to say, this is very expensive. And now they've just created a system that can deliver their particular type of media to end users...which makes them all just modern-day interactive television/chat networks.
Where then does all of their content come from? Well, as we all know, it's produced by users of their platforms - usually with financial incentives if you can produce more and higher quality content that attracts more viewers/subscribers. Paying content creators is then yet another cost for these businesses. Since they aren't just doing this for the lolz and the love of humanity, they are obviously out to make a profit...but almost no one who uses these platforms pays for access to them.
How then do they make their money? Targeted advertisements. That's the whole game in a nutshell. Social media platforms curate media feeds for each of us that keep us engaged and wanting more of the same or similar content. And while we keep doomscrolling like the addicts they've made us into, the companies keep slipping targeted advertisements in front of us over and over and over again, until eventually we start purchasing the products that have been advertised to us. And if the targeted ads aren't quite enough to get us to buy something, the ad sponsors are paying all the successful content creators to advertise their merchandise to their loyal audiences in order to add that human touch that pulls on our heartstrings and compels us to make the purchase that we were hesitating on.
In the end, the business models of these centralized, corporate platforms demands that they keep us addicted to their content, so they can show us as many ads per day as possible. The only way out of the matrix here is to walk away from these platforms and either avoid social media altogether or to go and find it on decentralized, non-commercial protocols that are being self-hosted by individuals or small communities who don't need to make a buck off of it.
One of the strengths of Geminispace is that its content is so intentionally visually boring that it prevents commercial advertising from flourishing. You just can't differentiate your product with fancy graphics, colored text, unique fonts, built-in jingles, videos, or anything else on a Gemini site, so businesses don't want anything to do with it. Instead, it remains a hold-out space where genuine human connection and exchange can happen in long form writing, consumed slowly and not sensationally. Here we can share our thoughts and ideas without worrying about being downvoted by a million bots or trolls because the level of effort to actually write a text response on these sites is much higher than clicking a like or dislike icon, providing just enough friction to filter out the low engagement crowd.
It's certainly not everything to everyone, but I've been around in this space for the past 5 years, and I'm very happy that it's still puttering along at a slow pace out here, largely undisturbed by the boom and bust cycle of modern markets. I hope your journey through Geminispace leaves you happier than you were before you found it. Happy travels!