From my understanding of what he said, he thinks that distributed social media would mean that the hosting would happen from our mobile devices as a P2P network

From my understanding of what he said, he thinks that distributed social media would mean that the hosting would happen from our mobile devices as a P2P network. So yeah, he did completely miss something, that would be a terrible architecture that would not only be completely unreliable, it would offer no scalability, except for really awesome cat videos. Distributed social, such as diaspora allows anyone to host their own social media platform, but also provided a federation interface to other nodes. The problem with diaspora is that it offers a small subset of features compared to Facebook, and the problems they needed to solve, especially with federation and content control, are really difficult. Further, the branding will confuse almost everyone as most people can't be bothered to understand the difference between a site, application, and protocol.