GNU social is open for signups! http://daisycha.in/
I like that they chose different names for the website and the project. It's confusing for people to separate the Diaspora project as a whole from the "official" Diaspora alpha site.
"Do you think people would rather use centralized, corporate social networks?"
Facebook for to where it is through being exclusive. It originally targeted a small community and expanded. The beauty of these networks is that the community they're growing out of is passionate about freedom!
"Are GNU Social and Diaspora ultimately too complex for anyone but geeks?"
No way =] It's more about what everyone else is using, anyway. Everyone has their own "threshold" for how many of their friends are on a service before they sign up.
It would be nice to start a campaign for the masses to export their Facebook data, delete their accounts, and move to Diaspora and/or GNU social!
At this point in time, if you are the kind of person who loves your visits to Facebook, then it is reasonable to conclude that you are the kind of person who also enjoys suffering and pain.
Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with liking suffering and pain. There are many people who do, and they typically pay beautiful and mean women or handsome and punishing men to dole out Facebook-style sessions. They charge by the hour, in fact.
These professionals are a lot better looking than Facebook. But I suspect that if you go to Facebook to fill that empty place where a harsh and cruel professional might be, then perhaps you settle with the notion that you are at least getting a cheap bargain.
Suffice it to say, if Facebook were a dominatrix, she would be out of business by now. Even when your business is customer fear and torment, you still need customer satisfaction and trust. Facebook has neither. Dominatrixes at least know the importance of safeguarding your secrets. Facebook gives people who administer pain and humiliation for a living, a bad name.
We know this. We sit back and watch the giants – Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple – and no one makes it any better for us. Meanwhile, the innovation sector can only belch up another Groupon clone.
So when Diaspora hit the news in May as a potential “Facebook killer” we all sat up like Meerkats and took notice. Promising to beat Facebook with an open source, privacy-oriented, personally controlled social network, Diaspora shook things up. On Kickstarter their goal was $10K; in no time at all they crowd-sourced just over $220K.
What happened? A launch was promised for the end of summer, and winter is just around the corner. Diaspora is still only in invite-only Alpha – while GNU Social, based on similar principles, is days away from their Alpha launch. Rumor has it that GNU social is much more complete than Diaspora. Some people think that Diaspora is too late.
Diaspora is really just the better known of the emergent open standards social movement – the backlash to Facebook, thy name is distributed. Standards are emerging that will allow GNU social, Diaspora, and other networks to communicate with each other and you keep your profile, your own. Many are thinking Beyond Diaspora. It is much like how the current open standards for email broke down the walled garden of AOL.
I got an invite to Diaspora, and I’ll show you where it’s at, and what I think– you decide if it’s the Facebook killer, or not.
