In principle crypto solves the first problem, but suffers from networking effects: creators won't list crypto for payment because most people don't use it; most people don't use it because there's nowhere it can be used.
As for a universal social media platform, that used to exist. It was called "webrings". Every website would link to other websites they vouched for, so you could browse around them, and sign up for those you liked by clicking a single button on your browser of choice, adding it to your RSS feeds, after which you'd be notified whenever a creator you subscribed to posted something new.
Most of that died when Google decided to oppose RSS as a public-facing feature, and pressured Firefox in doing the same. So nowadays it suffers from the same networking effects problem crypto does.
The whole thing is deliberately engineered to centralize decision-making in the hands of as few people as possible, aka elites, and, through that, to steer most of the masses in whatever direction most benefits those elites.
As for a universal social media platform, that used to exist. It was called "webrings". Every website would link to other websites they vouched for, so you could browse around them, and sign up for those you liked by clicking a single button on your browser of choice, adding it to your RSS feeds, after which you'd be notified whenever a creator you subscribed to posted something new.
Most of that died when Google decided to oppose RSS as a public-facing feature, and pressured Firefox in doing the same. So nowadays it suffers from the same networking effects problem crypto does.
The whole thing is deliberately engineered to centralize decision-making in the hands of as few people as possible, aka elites, and, through that, to steer most of the masses in whatever direction most benefits those elites.