I think some distinction is needed: The email protocol allows decentralization (in the sense of federation) and, theoretically, even full distribution if everyo

I think some distinction is needed: The email protocol allows decentralization (in the sense of federation) and, theoretically, even full distribution if everyone were running their own mail server. But in practice, none of this is the case and email is one of the most heavily centralized systems humankind has come up with. Back in 2016 I came across a computer science paper where the author had studied the decentralization vs. centralization phenomenon in various cases (not just in IT but also in real-life social networks, economic dependency graphs etc.) and concluded that every man-made decentralized system will eventually exhibit centralization to some degree as it will develop nodes that have orders of magnitude more edges than the average node. It seems to be a very natural phenomenon. I wish I remembered the author or the title…