Apples and oranges.  I use HN and Reddit because those have communities centered around certain interests (tech news here on HN for instance).  So I come here to chat with people about tech topics.  The design of the forum facilitates this, by people posting links to articles and then us discussing them.<p>Places like Facebook are full of random people, generally who you know but for a brand-new social network would be just a bunch of unknown randoms.  I&#x27;m sorry, I have no interest in trying to strike up a conversation with some random person who could be anywhere on the planet.  There needs to be some kind of commonality, some reason to interact.  On Reddit I can go to a subreddit centered on a certain esoteric topic and chat with people about that.  On OKCupid I can try to chat up women who live near me and have interesting profiles and go out on dates with them.  On GNU Social, what am I going to do there?  I have no idea.