But nothing stops most of us in the free world from choosing an alternative root system. Other than the support cost of a minor config change in our OS or application software.
The difference between DNS and Facebook/Twitter is that DNS is regulated so that bad guys have to go through some kind of due process to shut down your domain. It's not perfect, but it's better than what else we've got.
DNS is really only optional for email, at least functionally. But I think a lot of people assume there can be no email without domain names.
Instead of another service that will essentially turn into DNS, I would propose just using DNS for naming. So if you're Tyler Durden you register tyler.durden.name and put an A record pointing to your DiSo server. Now you can switch providers while retaining your identity by just changing the A record.
The original BitTorrent client was the first to offer decentralized [...]
I can't help feeling that the natural outcome of decentralized social networking is that people eventually start hosting them for mom and dad, then a few friends, then start companies, then we are back to facebook. Someone, somewhere is going to have to have a database of names mapped to servers.
Centralization is, in an abstract way, present in so many of our social structures, that yes, I disagree that within a capitalist economic structure (one which is optimized for sharing of services rather than individualism, ie: non-technical users simply wont do this unless the work is done for them, like facebook did) it would be next to impossible for something like this to work.
People quite simply don't want to deal with this shit, and centralization brings efficiency and management amongst many other things.