If I meet someone, I can exchange a lot of information with them by merely sharing my Facebook information. I can then "stalk" them and learn a lot about them. If there are n independent servers (for security), I'm now limited. I have to expose myself on a multitude of sites or convince others that my sys-admin is the most trust-worthy in existence. The sys-admins need to make money, though. Even the most altruistic sooner or later run out of funds, right? You could argue that each of the n servers will be designed to share information and the user interface is no different than Facebook today -- however, if that is the case, then a malicious individual can add a node to the cluster and then scrape any and all data that comes by.
So, either it shares information freely so that anyone and everyone can exploit it, or it requires a lot more involvement from the user. The avoidance of which is exactly the reason people don't simply use: Flickr, MeetUp, evite, LinkedIn, Google Calendars, Twitter, PlentyOfFish, OkCupid, et cetera.
I hate to be debbie downer on this one, but ~$180,000 is a lot of money to be contributed to a project like this, which from the technical aspects that we know so far (which of itself does not say a lot for something with it's ambitions, and given the name which seems to be almost a southpaw sucker punch to Facebook with the exodus/diaspora of users), might not even gain any sort of mainstream traction to be worthy of more than a cursory blog post from CNet once it launches.