Mastodon, Misskey and Pleroma are glorified clones of Twitter, and I'm sure there are many more like that. Pixelfed is a glorified clone of Instagram. A few others that I've looked at just don't seem appealing, at least not to me.

People need to stop harping over the technical appeal of the Fediverse, lest they only are interested in courting the technical crowd, which is actually fine with me. If that's what they want more of then they should not be concerned with who's a part of it. I think these federated platforms should not be interested in trying to appeal to anyone at all, because it's resulting in imitations of the exact platforms that we want to get away from. Under the hood they may unique, but all most people are going to care about is the front end.

Personally, my preference for a new social networking service would be very, very plain. Chat-orientated, share documents, comment on shared documents. No hearts or arrows or "Rebeeps, repoots, and boobops". Is there a way to federate message boards? I just want to talk, read and talk about what I've read. Is there a way to federate Hacker News?