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Remember Diaspora? In 2010, it raised $200,641 on Kickstarter to take on Facebook with "an open source personal web server to share all your stuff online." Two years later, they essentially gave up, leaving their code to the open source community to carry forward.

Diaspora is still very much alive.

Diaspora failed partly because it presents itself in such a confusing way. See Join Diaspora.: "JoinDiaspora.com Registrations are closed But don't worry! There are lots of other pods you can register at. You can also choose to set up your own pod if you'd like. There's no "Join" button, but two "Donate" buttons. Take a look at a few "pods". You can't see anything without signing up, and many sound like they're run by wierdos.

The latter is the real problem. A system where anyone can join anonymously and can have as many identities as they want will be overrun by spammers and jerks. Facebook has some pushback in that area, which helps. Facebook also started by getting people from big-name schools, so they didn't start with a loser-heavy population.

A social network needs some cost to creating an identity. The cost can be money, or reputation, or even a proof of work, like Bitcoin. Otherwise, the network is overrun with fake accounts. A distributed social network needs good anti-forgery mechanisms, to prevent one node from spoofing another. That's hard without central control.

you have to either host a server running a seed or find someone who is to run your stuff through

You obviously lost track... signing up couldn't be simpler: http://podupti.me/

.... for a social networking platform that does not track/store/analyze/use my personal data or relationship information.

Any takers?

Feel free to join your favorite Diaspora pod and donate them $2 a month.

Diaspora doesn't require you to run your own server (a node called a "pod"), what it does is allow you to run your own node and still interact with all other nodes. This is is why it's a distributed social network.

I think most users are still on the main node, however there are a bunch of pods that you can choose from.

What privacy guarantees? Who has reviewed the federation protocol? Last time I checked, it was an ad-hoc pile of crap full of serious design flaws and the reference implementation (which was about as close as you got to real documentation for the protocol) was a security disaster. The difference between Diaspora and Facebook is that people actually had to pay for Facebook to harvest all of your 'private' information...

Well you've just answered it. All the source code is there to run your own pod so if you are paranoid about the official host you can run your own and disclose what you like. See http://podupti.me/ for some pods that already exist. As for reviewing the code, the code is all there too on https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora so review it to your own satisfaction or not. Diaspora makes no bones about being in alpha so I'm quite certain there are bugs to be found. Doesn't mean that the principle is sound and from reviewing some of the federation protocols in the wiki it appears to take reasonable security precautions, and takes advantage of emerging standards for distributed comment / pubsub feedback such as Salmon.

Can you review Facebook's code? Can you see what data they capture on your behaviour and activities and what they do with it? Can you host your own code? The answer is no you can't. Facebook Europe does offer some toos for limited disclosure of data but certainly not enough to satisfy people who are identified major omissions in it.

Feel free to join your favorite Diaspora pod if you don't like the privacy implications of Facebook or Google+.

With EIGHTEEN public diaspora pods available, each with TENS of seeds, I think it's safe to say that everybody who's anybody is on Diaspora by now.