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In response to:
The Federation Fallacy by Alyssa Rosenzweig
The above-referenced article is very interesting, and the analysis presented is well thought out (as usual!). However, while reading it I saw a somewhat different picture of the situation.
The premise of the original article is that the Fediverse is not distributed evenly, and the top two servers hoard 41.2% (on the order of 800,000) of all the users. This fact is used to condemn the Fediverse to a complete failure as such concentration defeats the premises of a federated environment.
I posit the opposite conclusion: ignoring the top two servers as an artefact (more on that later), the remaining three thousand servers provide services to the remaining 1,200,000 or so users in a very federated fashion.
It is my contention that the 800,000 users housed on the top two servers are not federated users at all - not any more than Gmail users are. They either don't care about decentralization, or don't have the technical know-how to do the right thing, so they herd toward the low-lying area with lots of water, as sheeple do. So we shouldn't count them. It's an error at the margin.
Just because the top two servers call themselves federated, they are not really interesting to us as they've grown to become silos. After all, the Amazon network is a federated network of data centers spread geographically, but we don't count these either.
The remaining users form the federated network that should be considered for further research.
In my view of things, the Fediverse is maybe 40% smaller than reported, but it is a pretty wild success showing that federation is in fact an alternative to centralization. 1.2 million users is a good start.