I'm only peripherally attached (I've got a ... long-dormant Diaspora account), but there are a number of semi-inter-related open-social projects, which talk to various extents. "The Fediverse" includes a few of those, and I think it has bridges/gateways to Diaspora.
Frendica is another, I think, related protocol.
The problem generally is that the communities are small, diversified, hosting is a hurdle for virtually anyone, and individual instances can be finicky.
(On Mastodon -- a different technology entirely, but similar in concept -- I have two accounts on different instances, and since April have found that one or the other has been down, unavailable, or technically unusable for up to weeks at a time.)
Should some nucleating group decide that they were going all-in on Diasapora (or a compatible tech), that might make a difference. Meantime, everything seems stuck in slow-start mode.
Cool. I just signed up on Mastadon. Have you tried patchwork yet?
The slow-start mode seems to be default mode for all new social media platforms while FB is dominating the space.
I could see a service business rolling Diaspora out on-site to organizations.
I think poaching users is fair game and should be perfected across all the platforms. Basically, sharing on FB links that are hosted on a Diaspora instance. So the act of sharing on FB increases exposure for the instance.
That's ... on the order of Usenet ~1990 or so, per personal conversations with Gene Spafford a few years back. Where "OTO" could be 500k - 5m users. Much of Usenet was far smaller.
Microsoft did some studies on Usenet nodes and behavioural patterns in the early 2000s, and got some usage numbers out of that, though I'd have to dig to find them again.
I may have those too; I was at a company that bid to host microsoft.public around that time and their views on Usenet were very enlightening. I'll see if I can dig them up.
(Funniest part of the requirements spec: it had to "appear to be" hosted on a Windows server...)
As I recall, there was some degree of contention over whether or not Unix (a/k/a not infrequently Linux), or servers from a certain Redmond, WA, based company were superior and/or at all capable of general Internet hosting, at the time.
It's not an overwhelming lot, so I wouldn't expect you to find someone on there that you already know, but it has this sort of early internet forum charm, where you can easily get to know a handful of strangers and hop on there every now and then to talk to those.
Also, its community does very much consist out of the more technical crowd, with a focus on privacy and it also helps if you don't mind the occasional free software activist shouting about. That's just the group that's most likely to sign up to it, which can be a blessing as even with so few people, you always find someone to talk about tech stuff, but it can at times also get somewhat old...
Frendica is another, I think, related protocol.
The problem generally is that the communities are small, diversified, hosting is a hurdle for virtually anyone, and individual instances can be finicky.
(On Mastodon -- a different technology entirely, but similar in concept -- I have two accounts on different instances, and since April have found that one or the other has been down, unavailable, or technically unusable for up to weeks at a time.)
Should some nucleating group decide that they were going all-in on Diasapora (or a compatible tech), that might make a difference. Meantime, everything seems stuck in slow-start mode.