The best critique of Ello I've seen so far comes from a founder of Upcoming and Kickstarter: https://ello.co/waxpancake/post/oy73kFfDdhOPh8Jv9z9pFA Andy Baio notes that Ello is venture capital funded, and unless they have a "very special" relationship with their VCs, it seems unlikely they'll be able to remain ad-free. Diaspora's big failing, IMHO, was that even a friend of mine who codes for a living couldn't get one of its distributed servers set up. It had massive usability issues on that front, meaning its promise of a distributed network was hamstrung from the start as everyone had to rely on centralized servers. Gus