Diaspora* is pretty active by now, but still it's not perfect. But it's a nice online community for now and you will find people with the same attitude, to find and develop new models of social networking.

Friendica has even more features and can federate with Diaspora*, but it's still a horrible UX, no matter which design/theme is used. Friendica Red / Red Matrix is a restart/rewrite of the project with even better architecture and more powerful features and possibilities, but still horrible UX (but a bit better from what I see). Any help from designers would be welcome of course, but I'm not sure if it's even possible to create a smooth UX for it.