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?
I remember talking to the author of Lemmy on Matrix before he made the github repo. Perhaps this has changed, but he didn't seem to have any actual plan for federation. The early work in the repo appeared to be a Vue or Angular frontend (I forget which) with a Reddit-like style with server-to-server communication left as a "TODO". The author seemed to me to be mostly preoccupied with writing essays about why communism is a good idea, so I assumed the author is "an ideas guy" and didn't expect any actual work to get done on the Reddit-clone.
Then one day, for no obvious reason, the repo received hundreds of stars within a few hours. It was a trending Rust repo and was recognized on TWiR, but there was no actual implementation of federation at all. Just a JS frontend, and I think a tiny bit of stub code in Rust.
I'm not saying there are upvote rings or botnets amongst any particular group, but I haven't paid attention to GitHub stars since then.
When this started in Spring 2019, back when hundreds of github users decided to star this repo, there was actually nothing. Just stub diesel method calls and a JS front end. I think that's what's interesting. Looking at the issues you linked, I now see that a minimal federation implementation didn't actually happen until this year (and by someone else). I'm glad I didn't wait.
>federate Hacker News
Mailing lists can be somewhat like that.
I would think that most any pub-sub system with a minimalist protocol that supports text and maybe some file types would be adequate to build on. However, I think marketing and social factors have more to do with success and failure of these platforms than anything else. There are certainly a lot of capable programmers who have tried or who are trying to make a social media platform without pervasive user surveillance.
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?