I don't understand the down votes. In 2010 Facebook and Ruby on Rails were both still hot, so it's understandable that they chooce Rails. But, and that's the b

I don't understand the down votes. In 2010 Facebook and Ruby on Rails were both still hot, so it's understandable that they chooce Rails. But, and that's the big "but" that not everyone understands: Hosting a Rails site wasn't that easy in 2010 than it is today. AWS and specialized hosting providers where rather new, and most normal people still used (crappy) hosters that only supported CGI and PHP4/5. We are talking about a web software that should be easy to run on many servers, and PHP5 would have been definitely a better choice back then. Installing a PHP based software is a no-brainer, simply download&extract the zip archive in the www/htdocs dir. In the age of shared hosting and before the advent of language package managers, this was a big benefit. The biggest problem with Diaspora was that it was a big fluff, a great idea with a big media coverage - but it took the developers 2 years to get the software to beta status (2012): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network). A sad remark, one of the developers died: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy