I'm interested to know how they have been perceived as failure. I think this is all very relative, and failure is a strong word. Github still have 1 day old commit and the community is apparently still active.
As far as failures come, the only thing I have heard about diaspora are the following things:
* Source-code full of freshman's mistakes and security exploits. Basically not-to-be-trusted quality code, released to the public for deployment.
* All money invested in the project wasted without anything to show for.
* I know absolutely nobody using diaspora, expect one person.
* This person attempted to invite me, and diaspora failed to send me the invite email. Now he cannot invite me again.
It's a laughing stock. For the parts of the internet which has even heard about it. Which is the minority of the internet. As a social network this is a failure on absolutely every aspect I can find measures for.
The goals were admirable, but goals alone wont win you any credit. You have to get there as well. Diaspora didn't and most likely wont.
Failure in this context likely means "is not attracting large swathes of Facebook users" though frankly I think that's but one measure of the success of a social networking website.
Not necessarily. If you can make a federated social network that can interoperate with the networks people already use, people can migrate to it incrementally.
I suppose it is when the narrative is the next Facebook killer which the media fostered and perpetuated creating some unreasonable expectation for their team.
