Decentralization was a thing back in the 1990s and 2000s with all of the little message board communities out there. I think people desire centralization without the drawbacks of control going to a small group of people so that's why we have the fediverse.
Like all this is more of a move back to how the Internet once worked. It's nothing new (at least to those of us who grew up with the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s).
Even further back we had Usenet. Federated forums that all worked more or less like Lemmy. I was a regular on de.rec.sf.starwars until the early 2000s.