If anything can be salvaged, I’d suggest backing those up, and then proceeding to make a fully fresh install. That will ensure you don’t come across issues inherited from the previous blunders, and also, I think, will give you the chance to take the same steps, but wiser than before, and so able to avoid the issues you either caused or came across. (Also something I’d recommend maybe around every 1~2 years, precisely because of being able to restart but wiser)

I’m more biased against Google than against Microsoft, and as mentioned in another comment, the search engines are proxies of the respective companies, so it’s hard to give an objective opinion.

Now, what I would suggest, trying to be as neutral as possible, is to test both and see which fit your needs more. After that, use mainly the better one and keep the other as a fallback option.

Never paid much attention to that feature, but it sounds similar to microblogging, e.g. Twitter’s posting system. And given that, maybe you’d be interested in checking Mbin (has Reddit-like UI/UX), Piefed (dev says microblooggin is in the roadmap), Mastodon (Twitter-like UI/UX) and/or Misskey (also Twitter-like UI/UX)?

https://thebrainbin.org/m/[email protected]/t/563178/Some-quasi-features-for-Mbin-through-Ublock-Origin-filters

(edit - weird, the link isn’t appearing directly on The/Brain/Bin…)

On a more personal take, I prefer Mbin because “it just works”, I use far more RSS than the sites directly, and when I use them directly, I use an UBlock Origin filter to hide posts I either vote up or down (very responsive =D ) and block sites I recognize as manipulative (rather common sadly). That also makes so I end up not missing much on Lemmy’s functions.

Not familiar enough with PieFed to give an opinion, but among Lemmy and Mbin, of things I can observe:

• Lemmy has far more visual candies / visual noise than Mbin, whose UI rather barebones
• But as Mbin has a more basic UI, it tends to break less and be more compatible with user scripts and filters
• On RSS, from my experience, Mbin links to posts properly through RSS, while, maybe it’s version-dependent, Lemmy sites seem to have a bit of trouble with linking posts with links attached to their titles, usually opening the title’s attached link instead
• However, Mbin doesn’t seem to be able to fetch the post’s body through RSS
• On newer versions of the Lemmy engine, you can block instances and hide posts, but not block domains linked in posts
• On Mbin, afaik, you can’t block instances nor hide posts (both requiring browser modifications from my tests), but you can block domains
• On Lemmy, also maybe version-dependent, but it seems that instances don’t host RSS for federated communities, while Mbin does (good for redundancy, I think)
• For microblogging, RSS doesn’t work on Mbin (might in the future?) despite other microblogging alternatives having them, and integration of microblogging to Lemmy only happens indirectly
• On Lemmy, some communities seem to have an extra step to subscribing where you need approval after applying, while Mbin doesn’t
• Specific to Mbin, but the error 404 issue from Kbin when blocking or subscribing to an user or community seems to be extremely rare with its successor
• Lemmy allows visualizing how formatting will look like before posting, while Mbin doesn’t

On theming, akin to Linux, I don’t think there’s much room for breakthroughs, or at least they’d be harder to achieve, being more a case of picking the “flavor” you want instead. Furthermore, I think this applies to UI as a whole in social medias, federated ones included.

Now, one thing that annoys me and I think that falls on branding is how most of the federated platforms don’t have proper names. As I follow communities and people primarily by RSS, I like things to be organized, and having to figure out how to fit “names” like kbin.social (RIP), lemm.ee, feddit.uk and the sort is a bit of a migraine. "<.<