I was going to say something similar, or at least related. Centralization processes can occur on a decentralized architecture, but I don't think that means the

I was going to say something similar, or at least related. Centralization processes can occur on a decentralized architecture, but I don't think that means the decentralized architecture has failed. I think people need to distinguish decentralization as a network system state, and decentralization as an affordance. Centralized structures on a decentralized protocol can reorganize themselves, but if you build the system as centralized, it's much harder, if not impossible, barring some implicit decentralized aspect of the architecture. The question isn't so much "do decentralized systems end up as centralized," it is "can a disrupted decentralized system reorganize itself?" It's obviously relevant to your point in that the reason for decentralized architectures, as you say, is to maintain communication in the presence of threats, especially to free exchange of information. It's not necessarily to maintain a given network structure state. I couldn't care less if a handful of servers become dominant on Mastodon or IPFS or whatever, if it's easy to change which handful of servers they are should they start to become compromised in some way.