Some advice on your messaging: if you're trying to solicit hackers to help out on the project, tell them why they should want in. Give them a reason to believe.

Some advice on your messaging: if you're trying to solicit hackers to help out on the project, tell them why they should want in. Give them a reason to believe. "A brighter future for us all" is vague. It has no particular meaning. If you want to convince someone, you've got to figure out what he really wants. Then you've got to speak to it. And that desire is probably a little more immediate and concrete than "a brighter future." It has to be something specific, something tangible, and something that your target audience believes he can actually achieve if he pitches in. What are you offering your contributors? Is it experience? A great open-source community? (Are there any noteworthy members of said community? A little name drop never hurts, if done tactfully). And what, precisely, are you trying to build at this stage in the game? Then, when you target would-be users, answer this: why is a distributed social networking service better than a walled garden? For the end user, convenience tends to trump everything. Barring a few vocal malcontents, most Facebook users don't really give all that much of a hoot that Facebook "controls" the entire site. Ditto G+. Explain to these users why they benefit from an open-source, distributed SNS. (And hopefully this benefit far exceeds any temporary inconvenience associated with figuring out how to use it). Finally, you might want to split these blog posts / messages by target audience. Have developer-facing posts, and non-technical-user-facing posts. Try to speak to both audiences at once, and you're neither fish nor fowl. Best of luck to you. I am certainly pulling for you, and for your concept in general.