A very unexpected upside of self hosting your own communication and social media is that when you travel to china everything slill works even over the Hotel Wifi without a VPN.

I use PieFed, Mastodon, Matrix, PeerTube, and some more. Yesterday I wanted to call my Family in Germany and tried WhatsApp, Signal to have a christmas call with them. but nothing worked, the only thing which di was Matrix with Element which both my brother and my dad use, my brotherver the matrix.org server and my dad over mine. Finally we could have a call.

Similar with YouTube and PeerTube, I can access my PeerTube instance and watch videos but not YouTube. And next on the list Netflix and Jellyfish, I have some childrens movies accessible on jelkyfish which the kids wew able to watch. But the little one is ok with wattching shorts in chinese :D

And last but not least FaceBook, Instagram and so on, I'm already on PeerTube and Mastodon which I use through my self hosted instances, everything just works because it flies under the radar.