It sounds like it will get simpler. From the site:

"We deploy and run Diaspora with a deployment tool called sod, which currently only supports CentOS. We use Rackspace Cloud, but you can point sod at any CentOS machine. Sod is unfinished and probably has hardcoded configuration for our servers. It is not ready for use."

I imagine that once it has been around for a while, you'll find Diaspora packaged in all the major distro repositories.

What surprises me is the number of different servers that need to be run, tho I figure that's more my lack of experience with commercial grade social networking software.