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I'm pretty certain a large part of Ello's initial popularity (personally I'm expecting it to crash and burn) is because it is Not Facebook. Given a choice of something that definitely isn't what you want, and something that might be what you want, people can tend to choose the latter.

I like DW, but there's a *lot* wrong with it. Leaving aside my personal opinion that we should all be using something a lot more like CIX/good forums, where the service is subject/area centric rather than person centric (quite probably a lost battle), it's not difficult to see why DW doesn't succeed.

It takes up too much space. Tags are so 90s now. I would suggest that being able to skin each user's space is not a good idea. Also, post formatting and layout is enforced by the poster - which is wrong. It isn't easily possible to search for people. Mutual friends are difficult to navigate. No Events. You've already mentioned mobile access - it's dead in the water without that.

It could, perhaps, relaunch itself - but it'd need major engineering and a re-design.

If I may draw an analogy to the open source community, which you mention above. Although there is a degree of achieving technical competence and sneering at those who do not, the reasons are more complex than that:

1) It's built by people who want the product to fit their needs. If that happens to meet other people's needs then fair enough, but if not, they should take the code and create their own version - it's not up to a volunteer led system to provide what certain people want. (yes, this does create the problem that the community becomes self selecting and re-enforcing)

2) Things are not made difficult deliberately. It's either due to lack of resource, history, design decisions or maintaining flexibility.

There's a whole host of stuff happening in the open source world, and particularly Linux, balancing history, performance and support for older configurations. As a result instead of the Unixes coming together, they're currently actually diverging.

Also, whilst various projects need large-ish numbers of people to come to fruition, this typically consists of a large number of small groups, containing people who are not always easily replaced.

The end result of this? Where each project ends up can be substantially different from where it starts, and that can create an awful lot of drama in the meantime.