Tbf, that's what Diaspora tried and it never took off.

While I agree with the spirit of the idea, most people don't seem to care about the benefits that self-hosting would provide, and even for the ones that do, well, it's just such a hassle. And for the majority of the world that isn't particularly clued up on how tech works? Yeah forget about it.

Maybe that's where the web will go eventually, and I would see it as an improvement over what we have now. But the current reality is that mainstream adoption is centred around large, monolithic services and personally I am more interested in figuring out what is it that these services provide and how I can improve on that in the way that people already want, rather than trying to convince them why they should care about being in control of their own data.

So when I think about "decentralized infrastructure", I don't think about self-hosted servers, what I'm imagining is closer to, say, google app store. Sure, it's still owned by a single corporation, but anyone can develop almost anything for it that then can be used by anyone else.

Imagine what a hybrid between twitter and an app store could look like. Giving people new tools to integrate social apps around the web in totally new ways. Developing new ways of interacting with each other, rather than every news and blog site having the same facebook like button and the same "twitter feed" box and the same comment section.

That's what I want to see. Not "it's like twitter but YOU control your data". Having ownership of your own data is important to have alongside any product that you develop, but (as far as we can see empirically) you can't make that your sole "killer feature" and expect mass adoption.