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"Ironically enough, people do not live year-round in centralized hotels with cleaning services provided. They live in their own decentralized homes, and make an economic decision whether to take care of their cleaning needs by themselves, or to outsource and hire somebody to clean their domicile for them."

I think that this is mostly to do with the fact that you can't simply take advantage of economies of scale and centralize ever one into a single housing block the way you can with a lot of web-based businesses. Despite this, a lot of people do live in apartments complexes with centralized maintenance and utilities. Moving to a house is about gaining space than independence, I think.

This isn't a very good comparison though for looking at technology. The problem of washing dishes, cleaning a kitchen, vacuuming, making a bed etc. Is O(n) in _economic_ complexity. Managing data and technology services is somewhere around O(log(n)). Managing 100 servers is much more difficult than managing 1, but managing 200 is not much more difficult than 100.

It belies the point though that people at large prefer decentralization, just not the costs involved, until a model comes along which reduces the costs to a level which people can afford.

> There seems to be an inherent assumption that running your own services necessitates taking care of maintenance yourself.

An assumption that should be challenged. You can run your own chat server, with end-to-end encryption, thanks to the work being done by Matrix. Check out https://modular.im (I use them and am quite happy with it.)