Judging from the noise their release makes here on HN i think the diaspora guys did well opening up their repo 'early'.
And to steve: i think you hold 'professional programmers' (which i interpret as programmer that get paid) waaay too high..
Their entire reason for existing is "Facebook but private". At the moment, they are delivering on that like ROT13Snap delivers on secure backup. And due to a programming bug, ROT13 was applied twice, and indexes are on in Apache. It is a cluster flop.
Strange thing is, the advantage Facebook had is that it launched to a small audience initially with very limited functionality.
it took me 2 minutes to find out what BCC means. for those also wondering: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ sorry but BCC is not open source so i call it a bad comparison. commercial software is different. the thousands of diaspora end-users you talk of are probably quite aware they are guinnee-pigs of a facebook counter project.
"facebook but private", sorry but again i dont think you get diaspora as it is more like "facebook but distributed".
calling diaspora a "flop" is like calling mozilla before 1.0 a flop: it's open source (something you dont seem to get), its out there for _anyone_ to play with freely, to collaborate on, to learn from...
OTOH, they themselves seemed to have said it's not MVP either, so I think that's okay.
I'm still concerned about the longer-term viability using the reasoning of "This many basic mistakes doesn't bode well", but time will tell.
I wish them the best of luck.
What I meant was more of "someone who's knowledgeable about their craft," but you're absolutely right anyway.