... 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?