True. As I mentioned to someone else, I can always take a snapshot with TimeShift with my BTRFS partitions, upgrade, test it out, and roll back if it breaks.
Or, like you suggest, create an image, install another distro, try it, and revert with the image if I don't like it. But that just takes a lot of time I don't necessarily have though.
Friendica isn't that great in my experience. I thought it'd make a good facebook replacement, but it's missing groups and pages as a feature.
As for peertube, I have yet to find an instance that would allow me to create an account so I can follow channels and comment. And yes, I know I can comment with my other accounts like Mastodon. But the average person won't understand it that way because they're not used to that paradigm. And I much prefer to have an account for each platform myself.