The second you have a domain you can move it where you want. Change the software, look and feel. You keep subscribers. You don’t need to own every atom, just enough to give you options.
You can’t move your X or FB account. They can block you anytime, or reduce traffic. Way fewer options.
One of the top comments on BSky shows they got it back up fairly quickly. Try that when running on Google, say. If your business is on YouTube and they decide you’re dead, you’re dead.
“But also, as someone who relies on your site, thank you so much for handling this in such a quick and effective way. Waking up and seeing that the site is already back up despite this all makes me proud and grateful to be on itchio.”
Point is that you can choose your own adventure in a way that eclipses fully relying on another company. Beyond that, you can choose to own as many layers as you want and stop long before building your own hardware and fiber network.
Not impossible, but the likelihood of a domain being taken away on a whim compared to a social network deciding to "shadowban" or just disable an account on their network is significantly lower. Also, with a domain you might have a legal recourse to pursue with the registrar/registry. With a social network account? You're on someone else's turf, and they can do what they want.
It offers significantly more flexibility and freedom compared to any social network. If your data is "hijacked" (not sure that that means in this context, but let's assume the host terminated your account), you can spin up another hosting account on one of the many hosting providers and point your domain to it. That's it (not to say that it's that trivial for large sites, but that's the gist of it).
If your account on a major social network is terminated, if you had a large community there, you have quite literally no way to access them unless you had some kind of parallel presence somewhere else.
“Just enough to give you options” means you choose how much you need to own, and once you have the domain you can choose the rest. Back your data up, choose tech you can move. The point is that you don’t need to buy every single piece of infrastructure. Compare any of this to ruling your business purely on any platform whose domain you don’t own.
You can’t move your X or FB account. They can block you anytime, or reduce traffic. Way fewer options.