If I remember correctly you have to pay extra to be able to access private messages. Maybe you didn’t have this option enabled?

They usually work a lot anyway, not because they have to, but because they are greedy.

Twitter was mostly fine before, because it was before Elon added tons of debt to it through buying it. Now they have much more pressure to generate profit just to pay off interest on those loans.

I don’t think it’s bad, every instance has slightly different moderation rules. Reddit also has multiple variations of one subreddit, like offmychest and trueoffmychest.