Some issues with many of the platforms of the Internet is that they
- subject your work to centralized control
- restrict the form of the content you can produce
- may exercise editorial control over your content
The idea of centralized control here is that by doing something like uploading a video to YouTube, you are giving YouTube control over a lot of data. If you don't keep your own backups, YouTube might delete your work. On the other hand, the old adage that "when you do something on the Internet, assume it is there forever" rings true—you can never really be sure that a platform like YouTube deletes something when you click the delete button. For all you know, they have some big file collection of "things users wanted to delete". No matter what types of legislation are passed, you are forced to trust third parties to be faithful to their word. Oftentimes your arrangements with a big platform are very impersonal—you are one data point, not a client to have a personal relationship with.
The second point here relates to what form content you make can have. On Facebook, for instance, posts can only be so many characters long, cannot contain things like charts or even bold or italicized text, and will appear on users' screens in a way you have little control over. Formats like YouTube's videos now appear much more free—a kind of blank canvas to share content in many formats. However, any prolific video creator who makes relatively "high production value" videos will be able to tell you about how copyright strikes and other issues can erase hours of careful editing effort.
The third issue raised here is one that is very pertinent to anyone making any even slightly -controversial content—you may bet "shadow banned" (removed from searches) or outright censored/deleted for your work.
Solid foundations
While there is no final security in anything material in this world, we can look ahead at how certain platforms/places are more likely to cause us trouble than others and seek more robust solutions.
For instance, having a physical library is a good way to make sure you can access certain texts. While you may maintain digital copies for purposes like quick searching and indexing, it is not difficult to see how electronic copies (or even worse—streaming/subscription services) can work against the person interested in storing/archiving valuable knowledge.
Before investing a lot of time in doing something like building a YouTube following it is prudent to listen to people who have already invested thousands of hours into these platforms and then had their work demonetized or removed. Could they see this coming? How did they prepare? What did they wish they did(n't) do?
One strategy I'm trying here is to make all my stuff (mostly writing) in an easy to copy and distribute format—git source controlled text files. So while today I may be using GitHub pages, I understand that GitHub might go bankrupt or decide to delete a lot of content or something else in the future. In such a case, I could just use a different host for the pretty generic files I have.
Archiving audio/video material is more complicated because these files are typically much much larger—that is a topic I may have to look into further in the near future.