Centralization isn't the selling point you're thinking of. You seem to think that somehow, being decentralized means Diaspora doesn't allow you to communicate

Centralization isn't the selling point you're thinking of. You seem to think that somehow, being decentralized means Diaspora doesn't allow you to communicate with your friends or something. The whole way it works is that your friends can have accounts on entirely different Diaspora servers run by different organizations, and they can all talk to each other. It doesn't rely on everyone being on the same site, by design. That's the whole point of decentralization. The reason it didn't "gain traction" (are we all managers here or something?) is that Facebook already had a huge critical mass of users, and once something has established itself as the incumbent, it's very difficult to get people to move to something else, especially for social networks where it entirely relies on all the other people you want to talk to being on that service. If all your friends are already on Facebook, and none of them on Diaspora, well it's pretty obvious which one you're going to invest your time in.