Stuff like this is never going to work, because it suffers from the chicken-and-egg problem.  Everyone (who cares about Twitter or something like it) uses Twitter because everyone else uses Twitter.  You can make an account on Quitter or Diaspora or any other decentralized FLOSS network, but it&#x27;ll be useless because all your non-nerd friends (and most of your nerd friends too) won&#x27;t have accounts there, and will continue to use Twitter and Facebook because that&#x27;s where all their contacts are.  There&#x27;s not really any way around this.  The only thing that can happen is that something will somehow become so popular that everyone will just abandon the current service.  This is what happened with MySpace: for whatever reasons, everyone moved over to Facebook, and abandoned MySpace, and now it&#x27;s a dessicated husk that seems to become a place for bands to advertise and that&#x27;s about it.  This could potentially happen with either Facebook or Twitter, but I&#x27;m not holding my breath; the masses have shown over and over now that they&#x27;re happy to chain themselves to highly centralized, proprietary products and services: FB, Twitter, the &quot;app stores&quot;, not to mention all the proprietary software out there that intentionally and obviously uses nasty lock-in tactics.