Certainly, P2P services with federation require more people to put in effort, and for those that require each user to be their own node, unless they're designed to be very easy to set up, they're likely to fail to reach most regular people. This was part of the problem with the last wave of them, and could at least have been mitigated by better design on two fronts (first, designing the structure of the service such that it allows individual clients to connect to decentralized nodes run as servers, similar to Mastodon; second, designing the user setup process to make it easy to discover such nodes that fit with how you want to use the service).
But even with those drawbacks, some federated services were starting to gain some traction a decade or so ago. They died because the big players decided they wanted to own everything, and pushed their own services (see: all the various proprietary messaging services, etc).
Personally, I see decentralized, P2P, federated services as a necessary antidote to an Internet increasingly dominated by large corporations with a deep interest in harvesting your data. The problem is how to get there.
Certainly, P2P services with federation require more people to put in effort, and for those that require each user to be their own node, unless they're designed to be very easy to set up, they're likely to fail to reach most regular people. This was part of the problem with the last wave of them, and could at least have been mitigated by better design on two fronts (first, designing the structure of the service such that it allows individual clients to connect to decentralized nodes run as servers, similar to Mastodon; second, designing the user setup process to make it easy to discover such nodes that fit with how you want to use the service).
But even with those drawbacks, some federated services were starting to gain some traction a decade or so ago. They died because the big players decided they wanted to own everything, and pushed their own services (see: all the various proprietary messaging services, etc).
Personally, I see decentralized, P2P, federated services as a necessary antidote to an Internet increasingly dominated by large corporations with a deep interest in harvesting your data. The problem is how to get there.