Messenger apps are also inherently highly personal. It's your primary means of communication in the digital age. The idea of ads being injected into that experience appalls me.
It's main innovation, as far as I can tell, is that it uses the real world as a model for its approach. Your content spreads as 'gossip', peer to peer (over LAN/wifi), but also propagates through 'pubs' that are internet-accessible.
What first made me interested is that the Patchwork client is quite user-friendly and I've noticed that the relatively small group of current users are not all tech-savvy. That's something of an achievement. Furthermore, some other options I've looked into strike me as either unrealistically decentralized, or too (pragmatically?) centralized.
Anyways, even as just as a look into how thing could work different I can highly recommend checking out these types of alternatives!
It might be that I joined a pub with very little traffic, I haven't spent much time on it and I plan to have another look when I have some free time.
That said, I suppose the whole thing is inherently quieter than something like Facebook or a forum because it's decentralized and, of course, still a small community at this point. And quite possibly the whole point is not to be as busy as other social platforms :).
I also started to appreciate what's the price for decentralization: after following just a couple of users I already have several hundreds megabytes downloaded.