Platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and other are precisely the way social media should work in my opinion. The internet was always intended to be a decentralized system that's not controlled by commercial entities.
We have mountains of evidence that commercial social media platforms are manipulated to serve the interests of the companies that own them, and this manipulation is harmful to the users of these platforms. There is a conflict of interest at play on commercial social media platforms between the interests of the companies that own them and those of the users of the platforms.