@GettinSada again
Half my family are on Facebook and all of my family are on my own GNU Mailman list hosted on my own server. When this becomes available in a way I can reasonably install and use, then I and a couple of other family members are likely to leave FB other than as a reducing and automated output-only message and URL feed because it sucks big time. Why am I on FB now ? Because I don't want to miss the traffic exclusively on there, but also so I know what we need to establish in competition.
So as far as I am concerned this doesn't compete with FB because the latter sucks so much. It does compete with GNU Mailman, and it promises to do so quite well:
a. by reducing the geekiness of the skills needed to operate your own server to something a greater proportion of the population are likely to want to do, e.g. making this more like setting up your own broadband router. Many users configure these devices, but most probably just plug them in and play.
b. By using the Rsync protocol over SSL to exchange files and photos rather than the SMTP protocol used by GNU Mailman. Rsync is much more efficient for this job, SSL gives it the privacy.
c. Running your own SMTP server and keeping spam off your network is really hard, hopefully running GNU Freedom Service will be designed to be a lot easier.
True, early adopters who want to make some money off it will need higher levels of skill than later plug and play adopters.
Mailing lists are also too inflexible. It is possible as I do, to have one hosted by yourself for your extended family, and very useful. But you want to do social networking with friends and family, and family extends to in-laws and their many seperate networks as with friends. Mailing lists have a binary membership relationship with each individual - you are either in or out and subtleties such as limited sharing based upon authenticated friend of friend relationship protocols are too subtle a requirement for a set of mailing lists and sublists to handle.
The hard part of this will be getting the software both sufficiently simple so anyone can buy one at their local supermarket and plug it in, and enough users can also understand how to configure it. I suspect that early adopters who have moderate tech skills will be more willing to seed and centre these networks of family and friends. Later adopters will simply want to run in synchronisation mode so they get at all their media and messages more quickly without having to administrate very much, other than to input a few domain names of groups they are attached to and personal credentials they have with these groups.