It was clear from the beginning that Diaspora would have problems — they were a handful of NYU students just learning to program who'd never shipped anything before, starting from scratch on a white-elephant project that several other groups had been working for years on. When they were forced by their schedule to release something a month ago it had more fundamental security vulnerabilities than features!

Had they not taken donations none of would have cared that they'd released a totally unviable social network Rails app licensed under the AGPL. Kickstarter did them a great disservice by raising $200,000 instead of their goal of $10,000 and swamping them with the publicity to match. The expectations were far higher than they could possibly meet.

Kickstarter sure got a lot of marketing out of it though (and a $10,000 fee)