I think honestly the problem is that these systems are not consumer-oriented products. I think there is a real desire by people to not have to live as rentiers in the digital marketplace, but there are not really products that cater to that.

IMO There's a place for something that merges a NAS, with some sort of overlay over current IP that is encrypted and fully peer-to-peer. But NASes are still too hard for many consumers to set up, and most techniques to overlay over IP are likewise too difficult, and basically impossible to correctly multi-tenant (you can't share your network space with your aunt and your coworker without sharing with both). Unlike IPFS, or bittorrent, availability is important, but not critical, and you don't need to promiscuously replicate your information across the entire world, encrypted or otherwise.

I think there's a market for something that is like "plug in to your local network, do minimal configuration, you can set up shared folders a la dropbox, and you can access it over the net". You can sync credentials with a username and a one-time PIN. You should be able to easily set up rules for sharing with friends, with smart defaults.

I think what's interesting from a consumer perspective is that there are things you can do on such a platform that many (not all) people would think twice about letting facebook do, like tag and organize photos of your young kid and share them with relatives/friends who have a PIN.

I also think that the time horizon for this is relatively short (5-years?) soon people will be so desensitized to advertisements/being a digital rentier that the opportunity will have aged out. 20-somethings don't know what a NAS is.

I haven't started on this yet, but if anyone is interested, my info's here.