The code quality was and still is horrendous, but that wasn't the issue, if there are too many barriers to get me to submit my code then I can't contribute.
I have all but forgotten about Diaspora
There's been a lot of refactoring in the pipeline, and generally the community devs have done a really good job in bringing things up to scratch.
* Diaspora - https://diasporafoundation.org * Friendica - http://friendica.com * Hubzilla - http://hubzilla.org/ * Libertree - http://libertreeproject.org/ * GNU Social - http://www.gnu.org/software/social/ * Pump.io - http://pump.io/
What's interesting is that the first three platforms can all federate with one another, and there is an established network that acts as a community - Libertree is discussing implementing compatibility with them.
There is also a wider effort by a W3C group to develop a protocol that could work across all of these platforms, provided that they all follow the same privacy standards.
