AAAAAND you lost literally 95% of every single person who might even consider using this. Stop trying to make "fediverse" happen. It's not going to happen. All you do is end up putting great developers into projects that will literally never, ever amount to anything due to an insistence on decentralization.
The federated alternative that I'm building[1], is trying to specifically keep some of the benefits of old reddit (and of HN, and of lobste.rs), most important of which being that it has no reliance on Javascript and that it has a minimal size footprint.
[1] https://littr.me (just a demo instance)
I do sorta wish HN had reply notifications.
There is a 3rd party app for that, though I haven't tried it yet.
The only problem with it is that it does not send you replies to your submissions, e.g. AskHN posts.
It kinda weird because for some reason in my mind Ycombinator was 5 year-ish older.