What’re you looking for that isn’t all the 20 some fediverse softwares?

I don’t understand the question. Pretty much all fediverse software was built with federation in mind from the start. They all started from scratch afaik, nothing was built on top of a centralized design.

They also happen to perform similar functions as earlier centralized websites, but that’s simply because those are the ways that people commonly prefer to use the internet. People use it to share photos, stream videos, connect with friends, microblog, blog, browse content aggregators, etc.

There could definitely be new paradigms of internet usage waiting to be discovered, but if the fediverse can’t even replace the existing functionality of the web first, it’d be very ambitious to start building brand new types of sites already.

Maybe mbin or piefed? They don’t exactly seem to have 1:1 copies among oligarch run services.

If it helps, here’s a (partial) list of ActivityPub software - I’m not sure why it doesn’t include things like Friendica or Owncast: github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub

But regarding your question, the first example that comes to mind is PeerTube. Not only does it look to me like it was designed from the start with federation in mind (I don’t know this for a fact though), but it also seems pretty innovative with its use of peer-to-peer video streaming. This 2 minute animated video does a good job of explaining what it does: framatube.org/…/217eefeb-883d-45be-b7fc-a788ad850…

Owncast seems somewhat similar.

It seems that most Fediverse/ActivityPub software is a “twist” on something that existed previously, but there is still a lot of innovation going on, instead of pure copies of existing centralized platforms.

Misskey. It’s second most used software in fediverse. Used in misskey.io, which has 10 thousands daily active user (possibly 100K-200K MAU).

Developed since 2014. Originally function as self-hosted microblogging, now turns into unique social media. For example:

• Misskey-flavoured Markdown, example
• social games (only two so far: Reversi and Bubble Game)
• emoji reaction like Discord (they’re the first one to implement it on fediverse)
• Antennas (tracking post with any keyword)
• Pages
• Channels (groups)
• Clips (bookmark with multiple groups, kinda like Facebook bookmarks)
• Achievement
• optional ads banner (just in case the server admin wants to do community ads, usually used for indie games, comics, vtuber, or IRL art event)

Their community is mainly Japanese, they desperately need English contributor and community to help them grow.

A nice example is castopod.org

I think that we need to talk about the history of software and social software here, because the current status is kind of crazy:

• Most of the big platforms didn’t invent what they are currently doing. Reddit is basically a forum. They had a great innovation with their voting idea, but functionally there is little difference between the many webforums we had before and Reddit
• Twitter is a microblog, which already tells you about its origins. There were blogs before twitter, on their own servers, talking to each other with pingbacks and RSS
• YouTube, well, basically just shows you videos, which of course was done before by people on their own servers

So basically most fediverse is not emulating existing platforms, but trying to go back to an internet we had before the big platforms took everything over. And with ActivityPub we have the protocol to ease some of the pains that the decentralized internet before the web 2.0 era had. F.e. you had to create an account for each individual webforum, which really sucked if you just wanted to ask a question or share something. Reddit with its one login totally took over, because you could participate in many subforums. It was easier to just hop into /r/cooking to ask a question about your lasagna then to find the relevant lasagna forum and register there.