Diaspora: New Beginning or Cautionary Tale?

Definitely a cautionary tale.

I'm a very experienced developer, and I think their steps to build are ridiculous. They chose Ruby for it's coolness, and great, you can write a blog in 20 lines of code, but Ruby requires a build process and to build Diaspora takes the equivalent of 5000 lines of code, and ultimately it still doesn't run properly.

Kudos to the team for what they've done. I'm one of the first users, so I'd have preferred it worked, but it's dead.

Make it easy, not cool and complex. Make it easy to adopt and people will adopt it.

Tent.io is definitely the right way to go.