What's with the asterisk in the name?
I read it, mentally, as "diasporastar." It's like if someone types "I <heart symbol> you," I read it as "I heart you," which is cringeworthy.
Do some people not do this?
Also, their URL needs the star, too. Diaspora(asterisk)foundation.org. I just can't stand in consistency. How you do it matters less than being consistent. If you can't put a * in a URL, don't make the asterisk part of your name.
Finally, it made me look for a footnote. That symbol already has a meaning in that context---you can't just re-appropriate symbols to mean whatever you want when they already have an established meaning. I mean, clearly, you can---but it's considered bad form, and for good reasons.
I bet the Diaspora* people are sick and tired of hearing this shit over and over, but you know what? They deserve it.
So now you have a very basic UI component (which is sadly not very innovative, being just a different version of Facebook's 'like' feature) but people are likely to attach two different names to it. Notice, by contrast, how FB constantly reinforces the use of 'like' as the operative verb. You don't hear anyone saying 'thumb-up this post on facebook' even though everyone recognizes the thumbs-up symbol as being synonymous with liking something.
I don't really think of ascii art as a form of basic ui function though...
That said, the spurious asterisk in 'diaspora' does look pretty inexplicable, and needs way too much explanation to people who haven't drunk the kool-aide already. Add in the fact that 'diaspora' is never capitalized, even if it begins a sentence, and you're kind of way off into the eccentric orthography zone.
Same thing with 'And show your love for other people’s work by ♥ing it.' By hearting it? by loving it? This sort of thing is not compatible with spreading by word of mouth.
Likewise, the landing page urges visitros to 'choose a pod!' - yet the concepts of seeds and pods aren't articulated up front - your one-sentence explanation of seeds and pods above should be the first or second sentence on the landing page.
To be honest, I'm not sure how reliable that metaphor is, as people may not care to be referred to as 'seeds' which sounds like some sort of cult terminology...but it's no worse than routers and nodes in Tor or seeders and leechers in torrent networks so that's probably not a big deal.
Also, why are there no screenshots on your landing page? I had to click around for 5 minutes before I found a picture of what the software looks like. The landing page is full of reasons about why you might want to use it, but does a terrible job of explaining what it's for. You can't assume that everyone is going to know that, and even for people who do know, there's no visual representation of it being a Thing That Is Fun To Use.
I don't think this was aimed at me, but to be clear, I'm not affiliated with diaspora. I just happened to be reading the page relevant to gp's question at the time.
I agree with that their exposition could use improvement.
I think it's a huge barrier to adoption. If people don't know how to say 'Diaspora* ' then they won't say it, and so nobody overhears it, nobody talks about it in the media and so on. Just because you're on the internet doesn't mean that people have stopped talking to each other in person. I heard about Google from 3 or 4 people before I went to Google.com back in 1997 or whenever that was. And so on.
And again, diaspora* don't supply any explanation for their orthography on their landing page. How are people supposed to know it's actually part of the name if htey haven't encountered it before? Communities like HN aren't a good proxy for the internet as a whole, you can launch something here but you need to make it accessible to a general audience if you want mass adoption.
"Diasporaaaaaa!" (As in "Spartaaaaaa!")
"Diaspor" sounds silly though. Definitively should have gone with Diaspora+.