hmm yeah. I mean I donated, but at the same time, I feel the whole app.net thing == dalton and his emotions.

The video is "I, I, me, me". And less about "we".

Decentralised would be awesome, with some sort of non-profit organisation accepting donations and paying bills.

Who needs a non-profit accepting donations? You don't see a foundation setup to support SMTP. The best solution for a decentralized approach would be a new protocol (and don't call something that communicates with HTTP a new protocol).

It could be all decentralized in the same way that email is - with DNS records. And once the protocol is defined, there could be many implementations. What would be needed is:

    1) a server to server protocol (SMTP)
    2) a client to server protocol (perhaps a web interface would suffice, but really a client protocol would be better). (IMAP/POP3)
    3) Implementations of a server and a client (and a web interface for the server). (sendmail, mutt/thunderbird/etc...)

Who's up for it? Yes, I know that's a lot... I'm just tired of seeing people propose a federated version of Twitter and end up going nowhere with a complicated set of specs that are damn near impossible to implement. You aren't going to convince the Google's, Yahoo's, and Microsoft's of the world to support Diaspora. And that's who you need to convince - major email providers. They are the the most familiar with providing free email/identities to millions of people.