"powered by Ethereum" -well I aint joining a site whose scalability relies on Ethereum who couldnt even handle few million cryptokitties.

Haven't had any problems with it personally, but I only have about 100 people in my network.

At the risk of being flippant the first thing Akasha needs to do is tell people what it does.

Would someone who is not familiar with it and visited the site have any idea?

Its a content management system that allows you to easily host and serve content on the IPFS filesystem, which is a decentralized datastore currently deployed and serving millions of documents. You can communicate with your peer network (friends) using blog-style posting techniques, share files (video/audio/html/etc.) and host them seamlessly on IPFS without requiring a centralized authority.

Pretty much anything I'd want to do on Facebook et al., I can do on Akasha - with the difference that I control the content. This is significant for content-creatives because it puts them back in the drivers seat for who and how their material is served.

Pretend I'm one of your friends. Why would I use a social networks like akasha which will cost me money, when there's multiple open source social networking platforms with reliable hosts? Things will get even more interesting as they adopt activitypub, a json-ld based W3C standard for social networking, in order to interoperate. Mastodon and peertube are already there, but I don't expect that anyone would pay to relay activitypub messages through Akasha for anyone but themselves.

I haven't paid a cent to use Akasha.

I looked into it more and it looks kinda slick, but is there anything really describing how it works? Everything I read on their website seems kinda hand wavey to me.

It uses Ethereum for the logic, and IPFS for the storage back-end. That might sound a bit hand-wavy, but I'd honestly just recommend downloading it (after you get into the beta) and seeing for yourself - its very easy to use, you don't have to setup or deal with either Ethereum or IPFS, and the GUI is intuitive enough that you shouldn't have any problem just launching it and using it. The initial startup time is a bit of a usability issue - it takes some minutes to get itself established on the network - but once up and running its kind of refreshing to be able to do all the things, without any of the typical social-media grot to deal with.

if you use ipfs, it is assumed that you are using your computer while it is open .. or simply, minimized to share and transfer files... that is not free. Really.... you are putting your computer.

It looks like the "Sign up for Beta" button is disabled.