Do you have any sense of proportion? FB is worth hundreds of BILLIONs and somebody wasted $500K or whatever on diaspora...thats not a waste of resources its a single FTE for at one of these companies today....Or do you have something else in mind?
I doubt the average FTE at FB costs 500 grant, but whatever. The point is, Diaspora didn't get that money from google or one of the giants who could care less. And it is now gone without making a lot of a splash.
But in the end, that's kind of my point - FB is humongous and I hope Mozilla does not pick a fight there. As much as I despise FB, I'd rather Mozilla enters the competitions they can win.
This is a common misguided sense of what "winning" is.
Mozilla's contribution to the web, is not that they have the most popular browser, but they have a browser with enough users that they get a seat at the table to influence open standards.
And there is no reason they shouldn't replicate the model and expand that sphere of influence into other domains. Diaspora failing is not a good enough reason to bend over to Zuckerberg.
>that they have the most popular browser, but they have a browser with enough users
Well yes, but they arrived at this by having a vision what a good browser is at a time when browsers were abysmal. They didn't arrive there by just wanting an open-source browser. Yes, there was a network effect at play too (everyone "optimized" for MSIE), but they were able to bootstrap their user base with the tech-savvy who were fed up with the horrible HTML/CSS/JS support browsers of the time offered.
They did not have that vision with FirefoxOS - they wanted to secure a foothold in the mobile market, but had no compelling idea on how to gain that in the face of Apple/Google. Similarly, disliking Zuck is a a really bad reason to pour energy into yet another open social network.
For what it's worth, Diaspora kind of sucks at the moment but it's not gone. Federation works, so it will probably be a good while before the network of Pods gone entirely.
