A few reasons decentralized platforms might never take off
I would love if the internet became decentralized again. But there are a few reasons it probably never will. And these reasons are purely political, bureaucratic.
Peering agreements of ISPs
Internet is not free for ISP's. They need to buy transit in order to give you access to the rest of the internet. Traffic on the transit is metered, so they pay for the amount data transmitted on the line. Since most of the traffic goes to the few big tech companies and platforms, ISPs are looking for agreements in order to make these companies install cache servers right into the ISP's data centers. This way traffic can hit the cache servers and the ISP don't need to send that data over the transit with saves money for the ISP, and the tech company as well.
The same cannot be done for a decentralized peer to peer system which consist of servers running at home and scattered across many data centers. This disincentivizes ISP to support decentralized solutions.
The lack of net neutrality puts decentralized platforms into disadvantage
Since ISP's cannot peer with all nodes on a decentralized system, they always have to use transit to deliver traffic to them. Therefore it costs more money, which may be charged to the customer, while the customer can still access big tech platforms with no extra of charge.
The smartphone ecosystem is designed around centralized services
An iOS app can receive notifications only from their developer. If this app is used to access decentralized services and servers, then those servers cannot send push notifications to the app. Who would use a decentralized chat app, that cannot notify you about new messages? That puts decentralized solution into disadvantage.
The situation is a bit better on Android but still not perfect.
The only reasonable workaround is having the app have persistent connections to the server but this causes great battery drain.
The moderation of user generated content on smart phones
Both Google Play and App Store assume you have 100% control of the content the users create and you are required to censor illegal content and ban users that do illegal things.
In a decentralized system you don't have such control, that's the whole point of having a decentralized system. Therefore you cannot moderate what users create, so you cannot satisfy the UGC moderation requirements. This can cause your app to be removed.
People don't care if your platform is decentralized
People don't care if your social media or chat is decentralized, and use whatever comes preinstalled on their phones. Without marketing your platform will never take off. Even a lot of people who are on decentralized platform do not care, they are there just because they were exiled from the mainstream platforms in order to voice censored opinions.
And finally app stores can a remove apps just because they think they are primarily used to access platforms used by bad guys. If the app is not in the store, then people cannot find it. This hinders the adoption of the platform.
To sum up decentralized platforms will always be in a disadvantage this way.
There are alternative app stores, such as F-Droid, and it seems in the EU even Apple must allow alternative app stores on iPhone. So not all is lost, and desktop/laptop computers are mostly unaffected by the smartphone issues. But the ISP issues still remain.
