I think Diaspora was an idea ahead of it's time. Market-timing is critical for a new project/startup and I think there weren't enough users in the world who understood both the costs and benefits of Facebook (or social media) to properly evaluate and consider alternatives. I think the world is different now and there is a growing group of people who care and would consider alternatives and others who 'have nothing to hide' and will continue to hand over personal data.

Edit: An example of my view above is the press attention that things like ArkOS, CozyCloud and others are now getting. It remains to be seen how many of these build large, sustainable user bases but it does indicate some level of 'market pull', which (imho) we should try and match with 'technology push'.

It sounds like you're talking about two different things. The Diaspora software could have strong central leadership (with an open source license providing a right to exit that may never have to be exercised) while the deployment could be distributed.