Because of network effects.

Building a social network is hard. A typical chicken or egg problem. If you don’t have a user base, nobody is willing to join, and if nobody joins, you don’t have a user base.

It usually requires a bunch of money to build a social network.

The fediverse has a long time to go but I believe it will win sooner or later.

Bluesky?

Do it!

That too.

The cool thing on bluesky is that you can create your own algorithms through custom feeds. Also to my knowledge the following feed is purely chronological.

It’s surely not as decentralized and free as Mastodon but it’s heck of a lot better than the centralized platforms.

Chrome ➡️ Brave - Open source and privacy focused

Search ➡️ Qwant - Good search results and privacy focusing

Photos ➡️ Immich - Pretty much Google Photos but self hosted

Drive ➡️ Nextcloud - Use it with Hetzner Storage Share, pretty cheap and easy to use

Gmail ➡️ mailbox.org - European email hosting focusing on privacy

Meet ➡️ Nextcloud

For me they are even better than Google. But I use Qwant now.

Raspberry Pi with Plex?

Yes it should work https://support.plex.tv/articles/201214366-casting-support/

You are right. My bad