Diaspora's curse is that it is a solving a problem that only exists in the eyes of people who don't need somebody to solve it for them.
Does anyone think my mom or my sisters give a damn about facebook privacy issues? NO! The only people that seem to are the types that come to HN and we all, for the most part, run our own webservers with our own blogs and pictures and soforth anyway.
When I tell non-technical people that Google is doing semantic analysis on their e-mail, (1) they believe me, and (2) they find that scandalous.
Unfortunately, this is not enough for them to switch. But if setting up and configuring a personal mail server at home took 5 minutes and no help, they would switch.
Now, we need someone to make Eben Moglen's "freedom box", to make is as sleek, as usable, and as cool as the iPhone. Then, people will buy it. Maybe not over privacy concerns, but at least, privacy will become a selling point instead of the major technical hurdle it currently is.
Does anyone think my mom or my sisters give a damn about facebook privacy issues? NO! The only people that seem to are the types that come to HN and we all, for the most part, run our own webservers with our own blogs and pictures and soforth anyway.