I still don't know what any of this is or what its for, but it looks and sounds cool and makes Hacker News all the time.
Once upon a time there was a social network called "Facebook" and everybody was on it but they also hated it because of its privacy abuses and general anti-consumer approach to social networking. One day, a group of nerds said they could make a decentralized social network that you would have control over. There would be no giant corporation full of server farms requiring your trust; you, yourself would be the alpha and omega of your profile, your interface, your software. The internet swooned. Unfortunately, the nerds were building server software, not user software, and they were doing it with too little money. They had open alphas and betas that further drove home the point that theirs was a nerd architecture that Kim Kardashian would never post selfies on. Then one of the founders committed suicide, and then Google Plus came out, which looked shockingly like Diaspora, a fact that even Google copped to (saying something like "the diaspora team did a lot of stuff right and we chose to emulate their successful design" or some shit) and since they were Google and Diaspora was three grieving nerds, that was that. Within about a month it was clear that nobody gave a fuck about Google Plus. Six months after that, when Diaspora could actually be run by people who didn't want to configure a server, it was clear that Diaspora was essentially Google Plus without the extensibility of Google and with no real way to find friends (or even people who spoke your own language). Thus, it died hard and only nerds remember. But the nerds remember the dream of a decentralized social network beyond the control and censure of anyone. thus, they keep trying. Akasha is more than that. In addition to being a decentralized social network, it's also a proof-of-concept to demonstrate that the Ethereum blockchain is useful for more than nerd goldbugging. But, as with all social networks, its success or failure will be wholly dependent on attracting a critical mass of users... which hasn't happened since Facebook supplanted Myspace. It also has the disadvantage of being based on Ethereum, which hard forks regularly away from catastrophic failures of trust, thereby leading to a fundamental basis of distrust. So really, it's a demonstration architecture of the dreamy governmentless future in which we are all our own standard bearers, freely distributing our intellectual wares for checksummed micropayments and earning our daily bread and watching our daily circuses safely freed from the chains of The Man. But until a rogue president chooses to pick a fight with Meryl Streep on it, it shall remain but a dream.
MySpace took off because it was first where your favorite bands were and then where all the people you met at shows were. Facebook took off because it was where everyone at your university organized their social lives. Diaspora was where the privacy conscious nerds were, which is a big draw for privacy conscious nerds and pretty much no one else. I think a distributed social network could succeed, but it'd have to find a community a large number of people are/want to be a part of to be early adopters.