Maybe it's just me that noticed or felt this, but often times a service or product builds up a lot of hype and ends up being vaporware. Diaspora got mainstream attention when Zuckerberg donated money to them and when they complained at the height of Facebook's privacy problems. But then didn't deliver until like a year later?
Similar thing happened with Google+. I remember my non-techie friends wanting to get in, but it took weeks for invites to open up until people didn't care anymore.
The lesson in all this: when you have hype, DELIVER THE PRODUCT.
And when you do deliver the product, don't chase away half the people who show up with stupid, arbitrary, exclusionary restrictions and rules. Because smart people won't dance on your little strings.
How is it vaporware when it's a working and functional social network? It's not as feature rich as it could be - there are a lot of things to improve there. But it's working, which is NOT vaporware by any means.
I signed up for an invite around the time it was announced. It took a while before even an alpha was released. Diaspora has unfortunately stagnated. The future rests with Status.net, Tent.io, or App.net in this field.
You don't need invites - there are many pods with open registration. I'm sure there are many projects that aim for the future. Diaspora is actively developed, which shows that it aims for the future too. Your examples are core technologies, not end user social networks. May be Diaspora will use them as the inner federation mechanism, who knows. There is an on-going effort to redesign Diaspora's federation architecture.
Right. When I got my G+ invite after weeks of desire to have a look what it's like, I list interest and I have only 2 posts on G+ till now, last was made 11 months ago.
Not only it was late, it was an utter disappointment. Now, I use Facebook mainly for its Chat - both on mobile and desktop.
Similar thing happened with Google+. I remember my non-techie friends wanting to get in, but it took weeks for invites to open up until people didn't care anymore.
The lesson in all this: when you have hype, DELIVER THE PRODUCT.