Unlike with smartphones though, I don't really see that anyone has a strong enough incentive and deep enough pockets to bridge that gap.

They however can run their own app or desktop app that can to peer to peer communication. The whole point of self hosting is that we can have data and network sovereignty.

I think, money is not really the problem here. Self-hosting is a shitshow on the same level and for the same reasons because of which package-management on python has been such a shitshow for so many years. There are too many conflicting usecases, and not enough effort for standardization.