You get it. This is why Reddit isn’t going anywhere and people are just downloading the official App or patching Infinity or Sync with ReVanced Manager. I’m an advanced user, FOSS advocate, die-hard Linux user and one that gets 90% of their mobile apps through F-Droid. I love the idea of the Fediverse, but I am struggling to use it for my own needs without all the defederation stuff getting in the way and becoming very hard to get around. If someone like me is having problems, then it absolutely isn’t ready for prime time.
In fact, I still use Reddit through a patched 3P client because my non-techie and non-political communities aren’t moving at all. As an example of something more mainstream: I’m a heavy Stardew Valley player. The Stardew community on Lemmy is dead, but on Reddit it’s very much alive and new posts gets thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments daily. What seems to be alive here is the kind of content tech-savvy people are more likely to consume: tech, politics, news, that’s it.
It reminds me of the Linux desktop back in 2017. It was promising and it was beginning to get more interest and traction, but still when you tried using it was eh. Almost there. But not quite there. My laptop would boot and run my Firefox and development tools fine, but then the audio codec would die and display “Dummy output” until I rebooted (in the best case, I had to reinstall Ubuntu in 2 cases where audio permanently died), or my Bluetooth earbuds would stop working properly or at all seemingly at random, and when I woke my laptop up from sleep there was a 1/5 chance that GDM would hard lock and force to me to SIGKILL my entire GNOME session if not SysRQ reboot to gain back control - and this was on Ubuntu-certified SKU running a certified ISO in a state that I had left so default desperate to see it working properly that I had not even changed the default wallpaper. There would always be something a touch too inconvenient. For me, it was audio and sleep not working properly. So you would eventually image your laptop back to Windows and go with it, while knowing in the back of your mind you shouldn’t, but you want to actually get stuff done and play your games, which actually launch without Wine crashes or GPU driver errors - this is how I feel using Reddit now. Linux has matured way past this point and it can now act as a main system no problem and be a reliable performer with a scope that covers 90% of use cases well, the dream was achieved. I hope the Fediverse will follow a similar curve with time, but after months of trying the Fediverse out a way or another it still can’t stop reminding me of that older stage of Linux: promising and growing - but not quite there, and unreasonable to use exclusively.
I think the fear mongering on Steam is excessive. The games stay offline on your disk, and most of them don’t have a DRM. Gabe Newell has also said that, in case Steam ever shutters, an exit plan will be provided. As for the Steam native DRM, there are already open source implementations that can be used to bypass it and Valve hasn’t done anything against it in years - so the only problematic DRMs are Denuvo and similar, which Steam does not control.
GOG used to be a valid alternative, but it isn’t anymore. With CDPR themselves publishing games with DRM on GOG, on top of starting to be lenient on DRMs, they are literally having something similar to a DRM that is required for some games, a GOG Galaxy API that is completely closed source. And it doesn’t support Linux, the FOSS operating system.
The fact that after years GOG still doesn’t seem to care about Linux, CDPR releases their games for Windows only (and more often than not with DRM), and Cyberpunk 2077 only runs on Linux thanks to Valve’s efforts is also worrying from a game conservation and ownership standpoint: Windows is a Proprietary operating system completely controlled by Microsoft, who can perform modifications remotely and is allegedly planning to popularize a model where people are sold very low spec PCs that only need to stream a Windows computer from the cloud with more powerful specs… not the platform I want to entrust the future of gaming to.
All in all, Steam is still the mainstream gaming platform I dislike the least and trust the most. If I’m going to buy a game and hope it’s going to be playable decades into the future, it used to be GOG, but now it’s Steam from me.