I'm not even sure it's worth submitting patches to Diaspora, both because of the fundamental problems with the code, but also because of their "Open Core" licensing scheme (AGPL + contributor agreement): http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware...

Looking through the code, it looks like Diaspora is really just putting a front end and "aspects" on top of OStatus. I think it might be good at this point to just scrap the Diaspora code and start over from the basics with a good OStatus-based reference implementation in Rails.