Oof, I wish there was a nice unified way or a common pipeline to install fediverse services.
I began looking into mastodon (a Perl-based app), but realised that Gotosocial (a Go based application) was better suited to my needs as I could run that off a Raspberry Pi 2 zero. I can use it exactly like Mastodon, meet and interact with folks on Mastodon, but just through another service. For all practical purposes, I find no difference in the experience between the two (I have a mastodon account on the general server as well).
As another commenter said, each service comes with its own technology and innovation (some strive to be minimal, while others try to be feature rich). You have to pick and choose per your needs.
To host all three, you might need a decent server with 16 /32 GB RAM and 2TB drives; particularly if you're going to host a lot of high quality videos.
For mastodon, check out Masto.host as it makes the setup a whole lot easier.
Spot on, though I must admit you've expressed it more eloquently than the way thoughts form in my head.