But in any case, they give out invites like water, you just have to email [email protected]. Since that's the beta testing site, they're looking for beta testers, not casual users.
Diaspora does have publicity on it's side, I'll give it that. We'll see how user-friendly it's first release is in September.
(yeah - I know that's not as true nowadays as it was at the beginning of y2k, but I'm trying to make a point here...)
I've always thought the distributed social site concept had room for both those people who want to run things themselves and for service providers. Kind of like wordpress.
It's possible that in a couple of months Diaspora will look a lot less like a Great White Hope. We will see.
That said, I'll only use Diaspora for myself, but that's based on personal preference.
I know Ruby like the back of my hand and am comfortable with Rails. Also, my site's built in Rails, so Diaspora will probably integrate nicely.
In other words, it's software for anyone who wants to run their own facebook-like site. Except that all the sites running it connect to each other.
Once it's out of beta, most users will just go to a sign up page of any number of nodes out there (I think there's like 50 out there already? I'm not sure)
Typical facebook users are not early adopters. None of these projects are even close to targeting typical facebook users yet.
I really can't say that Diaspora has been doing that better. Or at all.
The real problems with all this stuff is conceptualizing exactly how distributed social networking system should work is actually a really hard problem. I would like to see a description of what the best solution is. That is more important than some set of code that supposedly solves the problem according to someone's concept, which they don't or can't explain.
I mean, for Diaspora or Appleseed or any similar effort to work, they have to have a network effect. And this involves, besides having it work, telling people why they should use it, why they should run servers with it, and why it will work.
Except possibly OneSocialWeb, which extends XMPP. Is that the project you find most intriguing?
So when they "open to public": 1. who's going to notice? 2. with the current user-friendliness, who's going to care?