Three big issues.

Usability: A lot of these alternative platforms are incredibly confusing for people who aren’t tech-savvy. You can’t expect most folks to really understand the idea of Lemmy instances for example. Bsky kind of hit the sweetspot of being super easy to use, offers not just familiar features but better features than its competitor (blocklists), while also being an open protocol. Though they’re FAR from perfect (their team is extremely questionable to say the least), and it doesn’t seem like the protocol itself is gaining traction.

Population: This is a self-defeating prophecy. We saw it with twitter to bluesky, and we’re JUST starting to see it with reddit to lemmy. The vast majority of people just won’t shift to platforms where the people they want to interact with aren’t present. They won’t move until they feel like they absolutely have to. People put off moving from the Nazi bar formerly known as twitter for literally a year - the site’s been nothing but a cesspool for ages now, but the vast majority of users couldn’t be bothered to moved to an alternative site until bsky got lucky. Hell, even now, so many people still stick to it because they’re afraid of losing engagement or some bullshit.

Algorithms: I HATE algorithmic feed bullshit, give me chronological 100% of the time, but frankly the vast majority of people have been spoonfed algorithmic feeds for at least a decade now. Going back to bluesky as an example (since it’s probably the most successful example of an alternative platform at the moment), it prioritizes the chronological feed, sure, but I’m actually amazed (and appalled) at how many people apparently only use the Discover tab. It’s a necessary evil until we can wean the general populace off of their instant gratification and endless scrolls.

Platforms and protocols should be tools first and foremost, sure, but communities should never be tolerant of fascists and nazis. Any viable platform should have, at the absolute bare minimum, enforced rules against hate speech, which is something that’s not remotely enforced on any big platform today.

Letting the right run rampant is why social media is in the state its in today, and a shift to open platforms is our chance to take these spaces back and show the right that they’re not welcome in society as a whole.

Let’s add a 4th person in there, someone who thinks they’re helping by doing nothing but yelling that the fire isn’t allowed to burn things

This is absolutely one of the reasons they’re pushing this garbage so hard. It’s VERY easy to manipulate as a propaganda tool.

You can already see that most of these tools lean right because their userbase does - leftists don’t touch this garbage because of numerous ethical concerns as-is. Add more astroturfing on top of that, and now it’s just a straight up automated fascist mouthpiece.

Of course it’s right-wing, lemmy.world is literally just a liberal hub LOL, its no different than reddit’s awful default subs.

I haven’t majorly fucked up any recent systems (almost botched the steam deck once or twice but nothing that required a reinstall), but god 10 years ago I probably reset my arch dual boot like five times lmao

I’ll toss in a vouch for bazzite too. I tried it out and it’s not at all for me, but that’s because I wanted to tinker with shit and bazzite’s a very “locked-down” immutable distro. if you want something that just works out of the box and don’t plan on doing a lot of tweaking, it’ll get the job done. I ended up switching to cachyOS which suits my needs much better, but I don’t think I’d recommend it to someone brand new to linux as a whole.