Mission improbable, certainly, and many recalling the original excitement might see it today as a predictable failure. Diaspora has not penetrated popular culture or become a staple of global commerce. It is not both verb and noun, understood across the globe, like Facebook. The four young founders are now three; Mr. Zhitomirskiy, a charismatic math prodigy and competitive-swing-dancing, Dumpster-diving, power-kiting, unicycling juggler, took his life in November 2011. The others have moved on to other work.

Yet to declare Diaspora a failure badly misreads not just the project but the nature of transformation: We are still in the Big Bang moments of the digital age, so charged with energy that its guiding forces cannot be simply tracked.

No doubt, some people are indifferent to the revelations by Edward J. Snowden of how braided commercial and governmental surveillance can be. But many others feel powerless. Last month, when drag performers found that they could not use stage names in their Facebook accounts, a new social network, Ello, welcomed them, sequins, pseudonyms and supporters. A stampede began; at one point, Ello said it was receiving 40,000 sign-up requests an hour. While that has tapered off, the network has since raised $5.5 million in venture funding and issued a statement from its founders saying that it will never accept advertising.

Meanwhile, describing herself as “really, really annoyed” by not knowing what happens to her personal data, Roxana Geambasu, a computer science professor at Columbia University, has designed tools to make that data self-destruct, and also to see what companies are doing with information they collect: She aims to track the trackers.

The World Wide Web, which brought the Internet into our lives, was devised by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau. They released it without copyright. GNU Linux, the operating system that is the digital genome for billions of phones, printers, cameras and televisions, is free software. Netscape, swimming in cash after a dizzying I.P.O., was crushed by Microsoft. But a pocket of volunteers crawled out of its rubble and emerged, years later, with the revolutionary Firefox browser, built by people around the world. The near-penniless descendant of Netscape, Firefox had managed to do what its wealthy-beyond-words ancestor failed to accomplish: change how we browse the web.

In fact, when the volunteers wanted to celebrate the release of Firefox 1.0 in November 2004, they had to pass the hat to pay for an advertisement.

It has been four years since Diaspora was started; it now resides within the Free Software Support Network. While no reliable census is possible of a decentralized project, it is certain that dozens of pods around the world host a few hundred thousand Diaspora users.