Ask HN: Debriefing Diaspora; where did flexibility go?

In mere moments, it seemed, the Diaspora team managed to capture the hopes of thousands of people, who jumped on the Diaspora bandwagon to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The developer preview that the team then published was a catastrophic failure. It's time for a debriefing.

All the protocols for open social networks have two massive flaws, ambition and scope. Diaspora tries to replicate Facebook on a distributed level, but forgets about security. DFRN obsesses about the nitty gritty details of networking/connections, but forgets about the actual socializing. Diaspora lunged beyond the fundamentals of flexibility and extensibility and instead focused on a feature list of photos, messaging, and other social interactions. They missed the big picture. You can do virtually anything with the foundational protocols of the Internet, but Diaspora, for all it's hyped-up freedom, only lets you make photo albums? What happened to the good ol' days of hacking (in the classical sense of the word)?

My question to you, the brilliant Hacker community, is why are we not going back to the basics? Instead of trying to fight the fire (Facebook) with fire (duplicating it), let's fight it with something better. Why are we trying to prematurely define how people will interact? Why not build a namespaced, compartmentalized system that allows for any type of data, be that a definition of relationships with other profiles, high scores from a game, or photo albums? Flexibility used to be the name of the game, but it seems that it's now all about rigidity and locking everything, the user included, down.