I would be willing to pay for a hosted version of a decentralized network that respect my privacy. Decentralized is important to me not because I want to run my server, but because this mean I can switch providers or choose to run my server if I want.

Plus, it's really just an advanced version of email. I mean, you could build a fancy social network on top of SMTP. And SMTP is decentralized, so I don't see any reason why this shouldn't work.

Regarding Diaspora, it seems that tent.io is starting with the protocol instead of the frontend, which seems more promising to me.