It would be awesome to have decentralized social networking - no single point of failure. Same way email is decentralized - you can always run your own email server and enough people do to make it much harder to break or control email compared to, say, Facebook. FB is exactly one company, which make it a too convenient a target for overzealous regulation.
Completely agree. I think the biggest problems facing such a shift though are how to address "rendezvous" of the clients and the same critical-mass adoption that plagues a traditional social networking contender.
It's not just adoption - if distributed social network is impossible to control it's also nearly-impossible to monetize using traditional means, hence no one is likely to invest like they did into Facebook.