Depends on the story being told. Some stories are perfectly encapsulated in 90 minutes, some need 90 episodes.
That said, I find shows have both a lower initial commitment and a higher potential payoff, so I don't watch many movies.
I don't really grok products like this.
If you have a fundamental disagreement with a platform, continuing to engage with it, even through a condom, is still perpetuating it. It's maintaining that platform as still important and integral, and a place that others should continue to engage with. It's telling advertisers that it's still a place that's worth their money to maintain a presence on. It stymies the momentum in shifting to an alternative; why put the effort into a new service if people are still seeing your posts?
It's like pirating Windows instead of moving to a different OS. You're still perpetuating the MS hegemony and telling software developers that Windows is the platform they need to develop for.
Mastodon isn't really about the "celebrity" follow how twitter was, it's more about finding your own tribe of weirdos. I second (third?) the idea of following hashtags, and then checking out those accounts that post to those tags.
The other thing I'd like to mention is the people I see happiest on Mastodon have all migrated servers at least once. Get an account on one of the big main servers, explore, then move to a small instance that suits your interests and has people you like. That makes for a much more useful and entertaining local feed. Don't feel it needs to be a 100% match, it's more about the people (it's about the cones ).
Depends entirely on the person and what things they want out of a social life.
For me, if I didn't have social media, there's a lot I'd miss out on. It's how two of my main social communities communicate any of their events, and it's a big part of a third. There would definitely be a negative impact for me if I nuked all my accounts.
You can certainly build your life to have your definition of a thriving social life without it, but you'll have to go out of your way to find those groups that use other methods for communication.