The sad thing is all of the technology essentially already exists in some form or another - it's just that no one put it all together in an easy-to-configure box with a web interface. RSS for updates, chat over XMPP, messaging with SMTP+TLS+PGP. At this point it seems like most of the tools for the backend are done and the rest is would just involving plugging them together, putting a nice interface on top and acquiring the user base (I know - understatement of the year).
There is movement in this area - see sandstorm, owncloud, disapora, etc. Slap it all in an Odroid and you have control of your data again. But people won't pay for it.
I tend to agree, but really nobody will respect your privacy but yourself, which is why this should be on your own hardware (or at least on a VPS). A small box under my couch hosts my site, cloud storage (owncloud), and if I could get away from it the RSS feed that basically is facebook, and it's quite nice. It was too hard to set up, though, which is why sandstorm looks great.
The people most likely to be early adopters of such a platform would distrust a solution hosted by a 3rd party. Why? Because if you don't control the system, it can still be used to spy on you. Even a decentralized system with Wordpress-like companies that are federated are not immune.
