Decentralization is a mechanism for people to take back power over larger application networks, so over time it seems likely to be a bigger deal as people eventually get fed up enough with the private options. It stands the test of time better in theory as you don't need to have an account on 5 different platforms to see what all your friends are doing, you can have one instead, which is an appeal that will most likely catch on as tech and the internet continue to get more complex.

The key thing is the ability of the community to support it. When private businesses die, they mostly just stay dead and the remnants left behind are community driven efforts. When an instance on mastodon dies, mastodon continues on. As long as one mastodon instance is live, mastodon is live, and that's something private alternatives can't provide due to their reliance on income and control.