While we all strive towards decentralisation, the current state is that collectives with experts in technology run the services, rather than each and every person on its own. This leads to collateral damage such as shutting Lavabit down affected more people than Edward Snowden.
In our vision, everybody should be able to host their own mail/addressbook at home on her Raspberry PI. This is not done today due to the complexity of system administration: a general purpose operating system is used for running services. Instead, we develop a library operating system (named OpenMirage), which is configured at compile time, and can be run as a Xen guest or FreeBSD kernel module (Raspberry backend under development). OpenMirage is developed in the OCaml programming language, which is memory managed, thus certain classes of problems (such as buffer overflows) do not apply.
It is a radical approach - instead of reusing a general purpose operating system we developed everything from scratch in a modular way. But I believe it is the way to enable people to run their own services. A first application which uses this library operating system is Nymote.
The idea is further described in "Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System".