[facepalm]

Why did gnu social fail? What happened to diaspora?

I think what blogs were missing where the social network. They had the blogroll, but it wasn't enough. Tumblr almost got it right, but somewhere along the way they seem to have messed up.

[fermuch]

GNU social didn't fail. It still has a growing community. Check out mastodon.social to see a newborn server (with it's own implementation of everything, in Ruby) for example. It was featured here some weeks ago.