Hi @inautumn , welcome to the Fedora Discourse community 
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You have made several attempts to perform the installation from the live media and have described several issues.
Should you not solve the issue as per the instructions above, there is one thing that cought my eye in your post:
Are you running the installation behind a VPN or firewall? My take is that if you don’t start the installer several times, i.e. click on it just once, then wait patiently for several minutes (could be more than five), the installer would start. If this is true, I reckon it has to do with the issue described in this post.
There are several workarounds described in that linked topic, I am not sure if they are persistent/effective in a live session though. You could try them, and if they are not working, then please give the installer several minutes until it starts, as mentioned above.
This is just a guess though, your issue might still not be related to the one I mentioned.