Nice. Great to hear about your experiences, @Free!
You make an important point that there is value to be on social networks. It all depends on what you get out of it, and there is a delicate balance to be found to make optimal use of them.
If you want to be a principled activist (for e.g. privacy reasons, or anti-Big Tech, or otherwise) and you completely disconnect, then this has its implications, as you say, that may put you at a disconvenience. It is not just FOMO, but you are actually missing out.
Apart from valuable personal connections, there is also good content to be found on e.g. Twitter, FB and YouTube. But you have to be careful to not be sucked into the bad parts of these networks. This can be done by carefully managing who you follow, what your privacy + notification settings are, etc. And there are tools you can use to help improve this experience and also - in many cases - use alternative clients to access these social networks. See awesome-humane-tech for a list of candidates here.
I’m more or less bound to Whatsapp for the reasons you describe. Giving that up in favor of, say, Signal app would mean losing personal connections. The only other big tech platform I get some value from is LinkedIn (mostly as a ‘rolodex’, and for what it’s meant: job-related stuff).
Each social media platform, forum big or small has its own purpose and pros and cons. The reasons to be there or not are very personal.
I love Fediverse / Mastodon for a number of reasons: the overall culture, the audience I’m interested in (humanetech and human rightss activists, FOSS community, open-minded critical thinkers, etc.). The grassroots nature of the Fediverse and how it evolves holds a promise for humane technology in itself.
PixelFed is the tiny little sister alternative to Instagram. The fact that Fediverse is small, nowhere near in size and scale compared to the Big Tech social networks, to me is an advantage also. It feels like the Web in its early beginnings. Fresh, and not dominated by big commerce at all. Plus I fear for the time when Fediverse gains real network effects. Hope it can deal with that at that time. There’s danger there, see: Are we ready for the threats posed to the upcoming decentralization movement?