I very much like this vision, that's what brought me to the !fediverse and to the other distributed socnets. On the public side of things, it creates a more resilient network (e.g. against censorhip, corporate bias...). On the private side, it allows you to keep data and communication under your control at the node level (e.g. with family & friends).

Still, one should be aware of the pitfalls of the current implementation. I think of the "federation issues" we discussed, the difficulty in backing up and recreating one's account on a new node, insufficient documentation, the difficulty of federating with other socnets. Thus I am just not sure gnusocial is ready yet for such a broad exposure.