If you'd rather set up your own server, here are some links to help you get started with that.

You can download/install the Diaspora* software to create your own server by following the instructions on the Diaspora* Foundation's wiki.

If you plan to use CentOS with Apache and MariaDB (as opposed to Ubuntu with nginx and PostgreSQL, for example), and you're installing on a totally fresh CentOS 7 install, then you can use OKSocial's scripted installation package which is based on those instructions but automates the installation for you. The download of that for the currently-supported (0.7.12.0) version of diaspora* is here.

If you would like to use OKSocial's local activity stream patch, which adds a stream that is public only to users on the local server, the download of that for the current-supported (0.7.12.0) version of diaspora* is here.

You can download/install the Pleroma software to create your own server by following the instructions on the documentation.

Pleroma had a bug in how it dealt with presenting itself as a different name from the one it's configured for internally (see How to use a different domain name for Pleroma and the users it serves), which was supposedly to be fixed in the 2.5 release (though we haven't confirmed that it was). We'd developed a workaround for that, and the instructions for the then-supported (2.4.4) version of Pleroma is here.