Why hasn’t Diaspora taken over the world? Because the setup for Diaspora is utter garbage. The instructions don’t work. They are vague when they claim to be “well documented”. You get instructions like: edit these two 6000 line config files, guessing at what you need, but get it right or you will have to run the 15 minute setup script again. Oh and we’re not going to set things up as a web page, we’re going to use a weird port through our own server, but just reverse proxy that and you’re all good.
The people who set this up clearly want to fail. Rails is clunky. Diaspora is deserves a lingering death.