Assumes facts not in evidence. "But what if I don't get to know what that girl I vaguely knew in English class 30 years ago had for breakfast?" listen to yourself. Social media is a badly gamified, thin gruel substitute for actual conversation and everyone knows it. Besides which you're assuming that a top-down infrastructure is the only way this works - when fuckin' blogchains did a better job anyway. 'member back when you didn't need to know who someone voted for to be friends with them, you just needed to share an interest in z-gauge Marklin trains? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Study after study after study after study after study supports the fundamental truth that social media makes people less happy, not more. If I could change my enameling and watchmaking groups for alt.rec.watchmaking.humor or whatever I'd do it in an instant. The fact that the killer productivity app is basically IRC for $40/seat says some shit, namely that the minute we traded Mosaic for Netscape we were fucked.
... man... I miss rec.moto and rec.pyro... those were great groups... And one of my favorite rec.moto sub-groups is actually on FB... it's funny... same content 30 years later, just now with higher rez images. And I miss the time when everyone had a web site and had to publish their links list... rat-holing through pages and pages of links was a fun way to discover sites before Yahoo came along...
The promise of Diaspora was that your "facebook" was a server that you controlled which allowed you to link up with everyone else. Google is dumb. Google is dumbly dumb. Their move wasn't Google Plus, their move was to sell rack space and Diaspora instances that you subscribe to through your Gmail which you configure and you keep running and you manage and you link up. Make them a dollar a month. Fuck advertising. Allow people to expand or shrink CPU usage for things like protein folding or aircraft search or decrypting the Voynich Manuscript or WTFever. The fact that a company that buys servers like they're cord wood decided that the way to beat Facebook at their own game was to suck at it says everything you need to know about why fucking Section 230 needs to die. If people roll their own iron they're immune forever and if someone is running their "business" in a way that crosses the feds, the lines are a lot more easily crossed.
Diaspora is going to be that "first idea" that never was successful (except Diaspora is a derivative of an older idea; basically a SaaS BBS), and someone later on is going to come and do the exact same thing and be hailed and great innovators and thinkers... and we old farts are going to go, "yeah, but Betamax had better image quality..." and people will continue to not care. It's turtles all the way down, isn't it?