I’ve considered writing a federated Discord clone with the guilds structure and so on but it’s just such a time-consuming task. But at this point I think the thing that will save federated services is focusing on UI/UX, and Pleroma/forks have been doing great at that.
I think the next step here is rich presence, but for these chat services they still need a lot of work. They need to implement something to the effect of the guilds structure from Discord, they still need custom emoji reacts, and so on.