Consumers want centralisation. All of this stuff is too complicated right now for end-users.
In an ideal world, my data would live on the instance but as soon as its mutated a local copy is sync'd through the browser/app. That way it's my data, and if the instance goes down, I can choose to sync it somewhere else.
Ideally this would be packaged up in one application, so for different kinds of "sites" the mechanism for syncin'g and migrating would be the same.
Consumers want to not care about the details. Most people don't care much about federation, p2p, full decentralization or centralization, until something crashes. As long as they have no problems, they would even play with the devil.
Centralized solutions, tend to be easier in usage, faster, and with a more stable moderation who maintains the peace. This is something decentralized solutions can't easily replicate, but it's not like it's impossible. It's just that so far not many are trying to climb this mountain, because implementation and maintaining of centralized systems is also easier.
You are partly correct. They do not care about details, but they want things as simple as possible, and decentralization makes that harder. See all people complaining (or don't understanding) about having to choose a mastodon or lemmy instance.
And copy+pasting usernames/post links that you have open, to search for it again on your own instance so you can reply... is not simplicity.
I can only guess as mass readers tried to migrate to bookwyrm, how many people would be complaining that they are trying to add a book a friend is reading, but it's not showing for them - because it's registered on another instance but they didn't realize
Or why they see different ratings, or less number of reviews than their friends
Consumers often also don't want to be dependent on local data. I would propose a feature to link (& sync) user accounts across multiple servers, that way no one needs to depend on a single server. Power users can set up their own server and use that as a local copy of all their data.
In an ideal world, my data would live on the instance but as soon as its mutated a local copy is sync'd through the browser/app. That way it's my data, and if the instance goes down, I can choose to sync it somewhere else.
Ideally this would be packaged up in one application, so for different kinds of "sites" the mechanism for syncin'g and migrating would be the same.