The problem with the alternatives is there’s no draw to any of these sites. Like people aren’t going to Mastodon because it has some amazing features that everyone wishes Twitter had, they’re going because they don’t like Musk.
There’s so much on Twitter that these other sites don’t have that it’s hard to justify leaving. There are so many politicians, reporters, athletes and teams, bands, artists, etc all on Twitter. I follow hockey pretty closely and every major trade that happened last season was first reported on Twitter. Will I get that breaking news on Mastodon? No, so what is the draw to Mastodon? What does the average user get out of moving over?
What do content creators get out of moving? An artist can have years of their work on their account as a portfolio to draw new fans and get work, but if they move none of those posts show up on Mastodon. Now they have to post their entire portfolio again, and that doesn’t even guarantee that their audience will follow them. Now they’re on a much smaller website with a much smaller audience and they’re probably not going to get the same exposure or opportunities that they had when on Twitter.
Those were standard military engagements, as in two armies facing off against each other with clear strategic goals. The US had the greatest military force in the world at the time, so obviously they would win in a straight up fight. Where the US military struggled was with insurgency, and they struggled with it again in Afghanistan. When the force you are fighting is able to disappear into the forest, a lot of your advantages get neutralized. You can’t drive your tanks through the forest, for example. The ewoks obviously don’t work as a 1 to 1 comparison, but fit pretty well with popular perception of the Vietnam war.