If we're going to build things without any likelihood of scaling them to replace centralized services, we'd be much better off spending the time on the UX side rather than the business logic side.

I'd much rather play around with some slick, futuristic-looking UI with stop-gap business logic behind it just to garner an idea of what would be possible if we had better decentralized platforms. How about a nice simple interface to choose N trusted friends to help me archive my posts? How about simulating a ransomware attack, then leveraging M/N friends to set up the account on a new device and having the system estimate how many posts the ransomware could access? Actually how about one that replaces passwords with M/N friends?

I'm probably being unnecessarily conservative in my ideas because I'm still stuck on our current technological limitations. The point is that if all the "alternatives" developers had been doing stuff like that instead of ineffectual Facebook/Twitter clones, there would probably be a lot more value in all that effort since the Snowden leaks.