Somehow, humanity has gotten good at taking systems that were designed to be decentralized and distributed (like crypto, E-mail, personal websites, and so on) and instead, surrender them to a few big companies who become single points of failure. We keep failing to learn from this every time.
It’s almost as if most people are too busy to figure out the complex processes at doing things themselves, and the very concept of civilization is built on exchanging good and services for money whereby tasks are delegated to parties that are better suited to focus on them.
I suspect the problem is due to the fact that designers of decentralized systems often underestimate the importance of the user experience.
Managing your own mail server, website, social media instance, music streaming, cryptocurrency wallet, power grid, vegetable garden, etc requires more time and skill than just paying someone else to do it for you. The result is that most people end up using a handful of centralized offerings except for a small niche of enthusiasts who derive enjoyment from the work and/or can justify spending the additional time.
Ultimately it's up to the designers of distributed systems to make them trivially easy to use if they want them to be popular and remain distributed. (Napster and maybe BitTorrent are the examples that come to mind.) Otherwise it remains a niche for enthusiasts and/or ends up with centralized intermediaries.
