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Reason #2 ("they make you sign the contributor agreement") is basically a declaration that the author doesn't understand US copyright law. If you are serious about keeping your code free, up to and including the ability to enforce its license in court, there are legal reasons to do this.

At least, so says the FSF (and so do the IP lawyers I've talked to about it):

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

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And if you are serious about relicensing your code under a commercial license in the future, there are legal reasons to do this. The gnu project is pretty trustworthy, but how much do you trust diaspora?

Actually, the contributor agreement is about getting the open source community to contribute a large percentage of the work and aggregating the copyright so they can sell it to other companies via dual-licensing, without giving the contributors the right to do the same thing.

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