[TheOtherHobbes]

Users don't bother with Diaspora because while it makes some gestures towards being simple and friction-free, it's essentially still a geek project for geeks, and not a mass user project for mass users who have zero interest in technology and just want to be social.

The distributed network idea has been around for a long time, and ideally it's how the web will go.

But it's much more of a technical and social challenge than today's server-based web.

To win users it has to be significantly better than what's available today - not just another way to do the same things, but with a few extra complications and unreliabilities.