Well, you can, but you have to be willing to pay for it. That's the key problem. Users love the idea of a free service that stores all their stuff, and that's pretty clearly not sustainable from a business perspective, but it makes it hard to compete with a real service.
They'll keep their stuff on the "free" service right up until it crashes and takes all their crap with it, or the TOS is abruptly changed to delete everything older than 12 months or that's connected to an inactive login or whatever, and it's gone.
Yeah, I was counting those types of "free" services as falling in the "centralized bullshit" category. Bit of a fuzzy use of language there admittedly.
They'll keep their stuff on the "free" service right up until it crashes and takes all their crap with it, or the TOS is abruptly changed to delete everything older than 12 months or that's connected to an inactive login or whatever, and it's gone.