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What I said in comments on the other story (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1344138):

"When I last thought about it, I became convinced that we don't need an single implementation, we need standards for multiple implementations to interact. Stuff like RSS, OpenId, OAuth, etc. It's a lot less glamorous to work to these, and to try to push them forward, but it's a lot more useful."

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After Diaspora works, it should be easy enough to standardize its protocol. Fixing a non-working, prematurely-standardized protocol is likely to cost more.

Based on other experiences that's "if", not "after".

But no, it's not easy, unless things like OAuth and OpenId implementations are easy to you, which puts you in a very select group.

What about all the other distributed social media experiments, which have been around longer, done more, and are working with established protocols? I still think that this is the real way forward.

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