what leaves me skeptic about these kind of alternative services like GNUSocial and Diaspora is not much when, if ever, or how they will be able to attract the necessary critical mass of users that makes them relevant. Instead, it what would happen after that. The main two questions I would be interested in would be: (1) do they scale to the size of, say, Twitter (~400M Daily Active Users, Facebook ~1B DAU)? (2) what…
I think the world needs more intelligent folks like yourself who have a healthy amount of skepticism. I myself actually consider myself a proponent of these decentralized social networks, and I'm placing plenty of faith on these open networks...Though i don't go in blindly assuming the entire world will eventually adopt these. For me, if i can get my family and friends at least interacting with me - whether through my network or through a pass-through between the 2 systems - that's enough for me. Much like your email example i agree that most will use some free offering because of ease of use, etc. However, there are folks like myself who do wish to host our own...but the expectation - much like email - is to ensure interaction is as seamless as possible between the proprietary and the open networks. I use Gnu Social for now...my hope is that if this stack (Gnu social) fails, i hope it fails fast, just so that the next evolution - whatever that open platform might be - could iterate and progress faster, again with the goal of ease of use/implementation, more seamless integration (between networks), etc.