[tim333]

They managed a) user input b) stateful server with Diaspora as an alternative to Facebook. The trouble with decentralisation is users aren't bothered with it unless they need it to circumvent laws with things like bittorrent for copyright laws and bitcoin for money laundering, drug dealing, cryptolocker extortion and the like.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Users don't bother with Diaspora because while it makes some gestures towards being simple and friction-free, it's essentially still a geek project for geeks, and not a mass user project for mass users who have zero interest in technology and just want to be social.

The distributed network idea has been around for a long time, and ideally it's how the web will go.

But it's much more of a technical and social challenge than today's server-based web.

To win users it has to be significantly better than what's available today - not just another way to do the same things, but with a few extra complications and unreliabilities.