In particular, it seems to me that centralization is almost a law of the universe (or at least a tendency). Lemmy may start decentralized, with dozens or hundreds of meaningfully-sized instances, but it’s easy to imagine a not-far future where most everyone has settled on just a handful of instances (or even just one).
I don’t mean to just be a pessimist here. I’m sure I’m far from the first person to wonder about this, and I’m curious whether there are ideas of how to counterbalance the tendency toward centralization.
I disagree with your statement that centralization is almost a law of the universe. Anything big online these days is decentralized, it’s just done transparent through CDNs, so you as a user don’t notice as opposed to the fediverse where it is visible to the general public.
I mean, is McDonald’s decentralized? Their French fries are replicated in stores that are geographically distributed so their users can go get them with relatively low latency.