This is literally the saving grace for Matrix in my opinion. As can be seen with Mastodon, federation tends toward centralization of the servers if there's even

This is literally the saving grace for Matrix in my opinion. As can be seen with Mastodon, federation tends toward centralization of the servers if there's even an incremental benefit to doing so and nothing encouraging otherwise. Matrix at least seems to have fewer barriers to usability/functionality when self-hosting, which decreases the detriments of self-hosting and slightly lowers the drive to centralize, but until P2P is default standard for clients the convergence is likely to remain with a mostly centralized federation infrastructure target than a heavily decentralized one.