Inertia, and a misunderstanding of open source. People are seeing Diaspora through the lens of a Facebook competitor. But the reality is much less sexy. It's

Inertia, and a misunderstanding of open source. People are seeing Diaspora through the lens of a Facebook competitor. But the reality is much less sexy. It's not like Myspace vs. Facebook, it's more like Sendmail/SMTP vs. AOL. When those walls came down, there wasn't a major corporate battle, no intrepid garage programmer wizard standing against goliath, just the ability for anyone to run their own email server with a very low barrier to entry. That's what all open source social networking projects are building, but the tech press doesn't have a good template for reporting on that, and instead I think focus on something that fits their pre-defined narrative.