Is this really a surprise? Everyone is using Facebook, which means many eyes that can see advertisements. The open source equivalents pretty much have nobody using them except hobbyists.

Indeed, I'm not surprised. Facebook's value is not its technology, but being the standard of communication for almost 600 million users.

Given that they're a volunteer project, what's the OSS project need the money for?

Or to put it another way: The OSS project is likely able to make that $10k go pretty far. (Not as far as >1B, but still)

> For your information: Appleseed, a 100% volunteer project, was started in 2004, while Diaspora was only kicked off around April 2010, so they’re certainly much further ahead of Diaspora in terms of development.

That does not follow.