You should always try to have your personal website, as it's almost the only internet asset that you can actually own.
I run my own website, but 85% of my traffic comes from Google. It's pretty much like getting 85% of your income from a single client.
Yes, there are points in time when posters have attempted to post child pornography there, but it gets taken down swiftly and gets reported to moderators as swiftly as its posted.
Your "epicentre" of child pornography on the Internet is Facebook, not 4chan.[1]
[1]: https://samharris.org/subscriber-extras/213-worst-epidemic/
8chan being dropped showed well how cancel culture works, and how in the court of public opinion one is found guilty not on evidence, but on sensationalist news articles that outright lie, sitting free from the pains of perjury and cross-examination.
I have not once in my life seen this child pornography or far-right content on 8chan that these news articles claimed infested it; one would have to be very lucky for the former to see it before a moderator removed it, and for the latter one would have to specifically browse niche boards that have very little activity compared to the big boards, which are simply about video games, lolcat image macros, and dating advice.
Have you ever seen child pornography on 8chan or 4chan? have you ever browsed them?
By your definition of child pornography, i.r.c., and Mangadex also feature child pornography, as well as Google search results and most mainstream pornography websites.
How to escape this fate? Do not become a big monopoly.
We live in an age where various resources that are essentially indispensable public resources are provided by private, for-profit companies at their own whims and the law should recognize that.
Even non-profit services such as Wikipedia of course have the power to influence and steer the world to a degree that no non-democratically elected organization should have.
The government is unlikely to be able to dictate algorithm changes, but reacting to and forcing favorable behaviors to the current regime to be preserved is certainly within their power.
In a democracy, government is theoretically the mechanism by which public concerns are aired and addressed.
If we wanted to encourage competition it would be an idea to start thinking more carefully about which bits of infrastructure should be in competition: i.e. stop letting social media companys buy out other social media companies (there's no reason Facebook should've been allowed to acquire WhatsApp given that they also had Messenger), and maybe require Google to run Chrome as an open-source project to prevent them vertically integrating the experience of "web browsing" under related technologies.
This can, and probably should include, public funding for alternative open-source products under the foundation model for different web technologies and vital services.
All of the above, though, require government action, as the current status amply demonstrates.
So back to my question, how do you do this without government? Or is that not what you were suggesting in your original comment?
Hyperbole, yes. But you get the point.
It just so happens that big tech firms have a shot of actually achieving it.
If you are reliant on search terms, I can understand, but otherwise, Google does not have control over your domain name resolving to your server’s IP address.
On dialup people tended to be more independent you jumped on the Internet then jumped off to preserve your precious 60 hours/month (and to allow your landline phone to get calls). That time offline was used learning about things and you couldn't Google every little thing.
I was much more into the fundamentals of the computer itself more than the stuff you could see on it. Making boot disks, adjusting settings in Windows, discovering Linux, learning HTML, sending lots of email, some IRC. The Internet grew in complexity and usefulness, and always on cable got cheaper but early on the computer itself was my main focus.
Now it seems as if a computer is simply a conduit to watch YouTube videos. It seems like people are realizing they need to be more independent.
Now it takes a few seconds!
Everyone agrees that most, if not all, of them are horrible people, but it is totally possible to lose your domain name if no one will provide registrations and such services to you.
That's a considerable development effort and probably out of reach for youtube creators who are large enough to make a living and depend on youtube, but not large enough to justify that kind of investment.