Are there any straight up knock offs of Reddit?
Pity everyone went chasing popularity, shouting loudly at each other and influencer moneys.
If you wanted to find a forum on a specific topic on the broader web, you had to sift through various sites and look for individual hints as to their vitality, and then register and introduce yourself on each one. With Reddit it was a single search away, and the more or less consistent UI made it easy to tell "this is the active one."
But importantly, it retained a lot of the value a forum does: a comment pool that persists, that shows up in Google later.
Discord is a TERRIBLE substitute. It's not meaningfully threaded. It's not externally searchable. It doesn't even have the "it's federated, so we're not beholden to one specific owner who will inevitably tank it." catch.
I also hate Discord, topic threads are the best way to categorise conversations. Discourse started the way down that path, never liked it either.
It can be if you're part of the ever-growing number of normal humans whose views fall outside of the tightening Overton Window that American elites want to impose on all social media platforms.
Reddit has its own particular, identifiable cultural aspects (some positive, some negative) though it's also large enough that it's managed to escape being pinned down to only its more negative aspects. Twitter maybe not as much among some crowds though it's still a very broad userbase.
Admin, mods and finally users set the tone of a site and lead by example. On HN for example the more one has read over time what the tone of the place is and the type of content and moderation, the likelier it will continue, almost Ship of Theseus style with regard to users.
While if this place for example were more accepting of crass comments and submissions then the culture would adapt and invite more of the same. Some might like or prefer that but it also has its downsides, particularly for users who like aspects of a site/sub-community but find other aspects more difficult to be an apologist toward.
Idk where I'm going with this apart from I wouldn't want to be in someone's shoes trying to broadly handle maintaining a decent culture that isn't weighed down/characterized only by its more negative aspects :p
I'm hopeful that Reddit alternatives which get popular now are getting an influx of more moderate users, who are fed up with Reddit's management's terrible treatment of developers (and overall bad direction lately with the redesign and pushing website users to use the app and generally chasing profit over all else). Sort of like how Mastodon got an influx of mostly decent users who are fed up with how Twitter is being run by an incompetent chud.
EDIT: But to be clear, what these Reddit alternatives are trying to do is still extremely difficult. They have a better starting-point than Voat, so I give them better chances to not end up as cesspools, but nothing is certain.
Voat was almost destined to become a nasty place because of the audience that reddit was disenfranchising at the time. If losing /r/fatpeoplehate was enough to make you seek an alternative platform, then the community you wanted to create smelled a lot like /r/fatpeoplehate. And regardless of whether you think that's a community that should or shouldn't exist, I don't believe it's a solid foundation to attract a wide userbase to.
The communities currently being disenfranchised are power-users, community moderators, developers .. if (Voat equivalent) were to happen today, it might find itself with a much more productive community to build from.
A good example was that I actually remember discussinf about the increasing rate of transexuality amongst children on there (what could be the causes, the consequences, etc.), all the way back in circa 2015. 8 years before it became such a hot-button topic...
Voat never went away though - Poal was created and the entire, quite angry and detestable, userbase migrated.
There will always be a spectrum of humans, and every spectrum has two ends, and there will probably always be the "80% middle" forums, and the "10% ends" forums...
It's at https://www.goobix.com/news/ , I would be happy to get feedback or build capabilities people feel as missing.
Backend is P2P, but the UI fits your "knock off" question.
It seems even a slight amount of required effort is too much for most people to go to another platform. Which should probably tell you something about the quality of online content these days.
The migration process is a lot of work and most communities just don't bother.
Social wise, I imagine there are controls to steer how the site allows new content. Maybe start with just the subs that naturally tend toward the most use and least controversy. The pet subs, car maintenance, science, benign hobbies, news (tough but worth the clicks), etc.