This should deter Diaspora and other open social networking alternatives exactly as much as a monthly decrease in the price of crude oil should deter alternative energy research.
Since when did Diaspora become an alternative to social network or even Facebook? No one knows what the hell it is, other than a few kids drawing some diagrams on a black board.
Man you are way out of your head. You are comparing Fusion research to Diaspora? There has been tangible research done on nuclear fusion, there is a road map, we known how they plan to do it, they are building reactors, they have 100s of scientists employed working on it. They may not be successful, they maybe horrible failures, it might never happen. But they are working on it. Its way way far from the black board and you can actually see the work yourself.
What do you have with diaspora? Nothing! Other than some kids notion of what an open social network might look like. No code, no prior reputation, you don't even know if they can make a tic-tac-toe. You know nothing.
So please don't compare Diaspora, something that doesn't exist in any form, to something that does (facebook) or something that people are working on (fusion).
I had no choice but to upvote this, possibly the most categorical, flat-out statement that diaspora deserves more scrutiny than they're getting.
It's certainly possible they'll build a solid product, but for something of this magnitude, and with the amount of audacity they have within their ranks to accomplish something this monumental (especially coming close on $200,00), they haven't particularly sold their case to the technical crowd that what they're going to build wont turn into vaporware.
More pointedly, they haven't sold their case that diaspora will even be worth checking out.
Researching alternative energy and actually getting someone to pay for a product that uses alternative energy are quite different. I'm sure those people who are currently using crude oil products will continue to do so once they see the price difference in the alternative energy products.
The same thing goes for Diaspora. It's going to take a miracle to make the majority of Facebook users jump over to a social network that cannot be used for free.