In the words of Gucci Mane, "A man can get lost in the sauce, but the same man can be lost without the sauce."

It's natural that here on hacker news we spend most of our time discussing protocols and implementation details. No, protocols alone are not a solution but they are important. What's the point of just re-inventing centralized social networks over and over again? That being said, in order for any of these protocols to reach the masses the protocol itself needs to be invisible to casual users. If the marketing for your new social network is "It runs on this cool decentralized protocol!" you will never reach a non-technical audience.

The end product needs to be as good and as easy to use as centralized equivalents even if that means making some compromises.