Well my decision to purge all user accounts and start over today is not wildly popular as I thought it would not be, but I think in the long term we can reset that Diaspora is a distributed thing. My decision was mostly based on the server I/O wait times being crap, and crashing the server all the time, so I wanted to try CentOSx64 from Ubuntux64 and hope that would fix my issues with stability. But also so people would understand that diasp.org is just one of many many pods and nothing official, by moving to invites and placing notes all over the site that we are just a pod of pods. But can see some folks still are not getting that its an open source project and I am just running the code to be a nice guy for folks to play and have some fun. For me to learn a bunch of new stuff, I have never done nosql or ruby and its great stuff to learn. I hope the cool folks that are running the whole Diaspora program itself can do some PR work this week to help people understand the pod concept, it will really help not tarnish their image when unrelated pods are down.
So after the OS update today:
Seems like we can connect new user names to other pods but old accounts like bob@diasp.org that have a new hash code are stuck for now since they are associated otherwise on the other systems and they will no add you twice (makes sense). Maybe once people delete the old contacts it will clean itself up who knows. I have updated the site in many places to indicate on diasp.org we are NOT joindiaspora.com. If you would like an invite back please email invite@diasp.org or if you want to try another pod check out http://podup.sargodarya.de/ for a list of many other pods.
Everything else looks better, faster, more stable.
Some more info on Diaspora* if you are still not clear what is going on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28software%29
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr