The clones that drew the most attention all ended up becoming right-wing cesspools. I remember they were often created because of free-speech absolutism which was code for "I want to express hateful views without consequence".

You nailed it

Whatever happened to voat?

I think one problem people here underestimate is the cost of running the required infra. I seem to remember voat fell under it's own weight?

Voat was hijacked by neonazi communities that used bots to massively pre-register popular community names and effectively prevent anyone outside of their circle from using the site. It also was absolutely full of tech issues and spent at least a quarter of its first few years down.

One could argue that, from the point-of-view of a reader, Reddit is a clone of Usenet, or Fido, or BBSes. Not the back-ends, of course, but the UIs, the organic growth of communities, the community spirit that often develops, the meta-arguments about policies, moderation, moderators.

If someone makes a new usenet I can die happy. Honestly hoping for reddit to crumble, I'd have a lot more time each day to spend on useful things