There is no a one for all alternative to Reddit. There are few promising tech as Lemmy or Kbin because they work with ActivityPub as Mastodon. What I have seen many don't like the free speech nature of ActivityPub and run away if they see a tech with an instance not of their liking.
But Reddit tipping point started because most of 3rd party clients are closing as Apollo, none of current alternatives have a good client as Reddit clients.
There are few centralized alternatives you can look up as Tildes, Lobsters and stacker news (focused on Bitcoin and Nostr).
This could be downvoted but this was really common to see on 90s Seduction forums or later Pick Up communities as "fake it till you make it". Back then it really helped me to move on of my introvert side to a more outgoing one.
Not sure if related but when i was an ESL student in Canada it was really common to see Asian students using English names as their natives ones are difficult to pronounce, maybe changing your name could play part of it.
Key problem ENS domains are only available on Ethereum mainnet where gas fees are really high. There are NFT domains as Unstoppable Domains which you pay only once and your domain NFT is yours forever, but UD have not taken much popularity as ENS.
Other think to know you can use your .XYZ domain on ethereum as ENS.