Diaspora - an open source alternative to facebook?

I recall, one of my tweets, two years back.

hopes #diaspora* (http://www.joindiaspora.com/) will become a nice alternative to #Facebook soon, as ppl hav started to realize fb's tricks. May 29, 2010  

Diaspora is supposed to be an open (open source) alternative of Facebook. As the same case with Windows, we claim Facebook too an evil, regardless of its popularity, and regardless of the fact that all of us use it. Nevertheless, nothing hasn't overtaken Facebook yet, and the attempts to mimic or replace it have generally failed. Google+ appeared to be a competition. Still it seems to be a mere cross of Facebook and Twitter, while not causing the much expected stir. Many of the users haven't failed to notice when Google+ follows what Facebook already does. For e.g., the cover photo. Facebook fanatics have already started claiming Google+ a failure.

An interesting fact of diaspora is, as a community run, distributed social network, it tends to have so many installations online, where you can register for one of them. joindiaspora was the first of them, and https://diasp.eu
and https://wk3.org are two among the other few. Much attention to diaspora is not given from the general user base. Probably because of its community driven and distributed nature, it lacks a central location or network to evangelize about, except the excitement from the open source enthusiasts.

For me, it seems it is not that easy to replace Gmail or Facebook that easily. All the gmail-killers or facebook-killers that have been introduced lately failed to grab the attention of real users, except the reviewers.