Mr. Salzberg (Photo: Darren McCarra via Sociable.co)

Earlier this month, Diaspora cofounder Max Salzberg told Betabeat that the team would turn away from the highly-anticipated, but daunting enterprise of building the anti-Facebook and instead devote its "main focus" towards Makr.io: a photo remixing tool that makes sharing and creating image macros more social. (All your memes are belong to friends, etc.)

It sounded an awful lot like the dreaded p-word to us, but Mr. Salzberg framed it as a natural evolution for an open source project. To that end, the team, which is working on Makr as part of Y Combinator's current class, posted a message entitled, "Announcement: Diaspora* Will Now Be A Community Project," on the company's blog today.

On the phone with Betabeat this afternoon, Mr. Salzberg compared Diaspora to Wordpress or Mozilla. "Lots of open source projects are community run," he explained, referencing two incredibly successful standouts. "Some people are like, 'Oh, you're leaving?' But that's not it at all. We can have side projects."

Devoting the majority of your time to another venture sounds like more than just a side project, but Mr. Salzberg insisted that "It's like people in bands can have multiple bands. [Diaspora is] something I did and I'm really proud of it. It's bigger than just me. We're never going to stop making cool stuff, we're not really a one trick pony."

In fact, Mr. Salzberg framed handing over the keys to Diaspora's Pivotal Tracker as a sign of the initiative's progress. "It speaks to the maturity of the project and that there are stakeholders other than the two guys who started it. Thousands of people love and use Diaspora everyday so the community needs to have some decision making power itself."

Mr. Salzberg said he wasn't sure exactly how many people were using Diaspora. "I don't actually know because there are thousands of installations around the world," he said. "People can run it and I'm not sure what they're doing to it."

Now that's it opened up to the community, he added, they can be in charge of things like feature development and launching fellowships. "This is how noncommercial open source projects work," he argued, adding that "Diaspora will probably have some foundation that's the steward of the code."

"It was never supposed to be a startup or something," said Mr. Salzberg. Despite once telling New York magazine that the attention from the early success of its Kickstarter project "almost paralyzed us,” he told Betabeat that the team was "just sort of doing something for fun."

Would a leaderless community be able to put in place the kind of governance structure an open source project needs? "I don't think we're going away, but there's never been a third seat to the community," Mr. Salzberg said.

Here's how Mr. Salzberg and his cofounder Daniel Grippi described it on the Diaspora blog (emphasis theirs):

Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community.

As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers. We still will remain as an important part this community as the founders, but we want to make sure we are including all of the people who care about Diaspora and want to see it succeed well into the future.

If you look around, you’ll see that we’ve made an effort to open up to the community more to help better serve it. We’ve opened up our Pivotal Tracker for community developers help join in (You can sign up here), we’ve launched a tool that deploys one-click installations to the Heroku app hosting service, and we’ve updated joindiaspora.com to be more community-centric, showcasing other pods a user can join.

(Photo: Makr.io)

After the tragic loss of one of its core members, the team behind Diaspora--a Y-Combinator-backed open source "anti-social network"--went underground for a while, privately grieving while attempting to keep the well-funded and highly hyped company running. But the startup show must go on: AllThingsD reported today that the Diaspora team channeled their grief into a new site--launched today and called Makr--that allows you to easily remix and distribute photos.

Makr looks a lot like a slew of different products out there, including NYC-based Can.vas and Obvious Corporation's newest platform Medium, while borrowing the notion of a "front page" populated by trending posts from Reddit. Users can upload their own images or remix already posted ones, adding pithy captions. Other users can then like, remix or comment on photos.

We caught Makr cofounder Max Salzberg in a chat on the site while browsing, and he agreed to discuss Makr with us--only after he was done making his bacon, of course.

"It’s kind of like the game Telephone that people played in kindergarten," he told Betabeat by phone. "You say one thing, but the next person hears another thing. We’re trying to think of a simple, easy way for people to be creative. You can play around with a simple quippy thing and then your friends can riff off of that."

"I think that what we’re trying to do is make memes for everybody, so it doesn’t need to be a lolcat or some sort of weird internet comment to be a meme," Mr. Salzberg added. "We think people will use Makr in schools and in workplaces. You can express some sort of emotion and other people can kind of respond in a way that's about creating something."

(We decided to leave the debate over the difference between a meme and an image macro for a later time.)

Makr's front page is dominated by images that are a little self-referential, including a bunch of remixed pictures of the Makr team itself and captions like "Makr.io: Powered by Mariah Carey & Pizza." But perhaps Makr's most powerful idea is the notion of hosting both real and virtual parties where users schedule a time to get together and remix photos. As someone who clings to our computer on Friday nights like most people do a whiskey sour, we can definitely see why that's appealing.

"Most people think technology is mediating you from the real world, but we feel like it’s giving you this opportunity to have another way to hang out with your friends," said Mr. Salzberg

As for the future of Diaspora? Turns out it doesn't really need the team to stick around and run things.

"Diaspora is more of an open-source community project; at this point there’s lots of people all over the world working on it," Mr. Salzberg said. "Makr is our main focus."

That leaves three cofounders: Daniel Grippi and Maxwell Salzberg, who are working on Diaspora full time, and cofounder Raphael Sofaer serving on the board with NYU professor Evan Korth. Mr. Grippi and Mr. Salzberg signed a letter of intent, effectively, with blog post today announcing Diaspora's plan to get to beta. "After long discussions with each other, people close to us, and members of the Diaspora* community, we have come up with a plan to get our beta out the door by early 2012," the foundation says.

The startup's three goals are:

1. Harness the power of the crowd in order to get priorities such as a privacy policy finalized, collaboratively with the community,
2. Hiring, and
3. Making Diaspora financially sustainable.

"A new social web model where users are not the product, but willful participants who are creating new modes of communication. This was our vision when we launched our Kickstarter campaign in April 2010, and it remains our vision today," write the cofounders of one of the most idealistic startups of our time.