I think you're far too optimistic. There very much are central nodes: DNS registrars, ISPs and data-centers. The prerequisites for participating have increased. Domestic Australian providers now require copies of government-issued IDs (copies which then make their way into America's private-intelligence spinoffs like Palantir, because it's these spinoffs that are selling verification services). The West is expanding its capability to surveil domestic and foreign populations. To participate on the open-internet is to identify yourself, provide documentation and have government- or private-databases verify your identity and to pay perpetual gratuity rents.

A thousand virtual-servers hosted on Microsoft's or Amazon's computers. That's the reality. It already feels as if Cloudfare is MITMing everyone. The internet has become more centralized than it was and that's a trend that will continue.

It seems to me absurd that the majority of a developed-nation's citizens carry around pocket-computers that are connected to the internet 24/7/365 yet none of them are allowed to host a blog on their computers (pocket or otherwise). (The reality is your mobile-computer is forbidden by economic-rent-seekers from talking to another mobile-computer even though they may both be in the same room; they force your data to transit over their infrastructure and gate-keep it so that the other mobile-computer is forced also into paying rent so that it can retrieve your data from the economic-rent-seeking entity [that may be located in another country; so that message you sent to a friend may travel half-way across the world even though their computer is three meters apart from yours! What a farce!].) Consumers are behind CGNATs and are barred from hosting by default. I was optimistic about IPv6--everyone could have a unique public-IPv6-address. The market for static IPv4s should have collapsed. It's still here. It's still demanding perpetual rents.

I'm an advocate of OpenNIC--a domain should not require a perpetual rent be paid to a registrar. The foundation's of the internet are centralised. To seek and agitate for de-centralisation is correct, but it's counter-productive to redeploy the same centralised software that got us to this point we want to move away from. That software was designed for a bygone era and it's been taken over by corporate interests. Capitalism is doing what it does best: consolidating! You're not going to de-consolidate by taking their software. We need a new internet. We need GNUnet.

GNUnet's still juvenile, but I do encourage users to deploy and play with it. We can get to a better internet that reflects all of us. Computers have become locked dumb-terminals for ad-networks and tech-oligarch mouth-pieces. They constrict the user absolutely whilst using your hardware, electricity and data connection to surveil the mobile-computer's environment and your interactions with it. If you dislike that future you need to participate.

I2P is a mature project and is ready to deploy now. There's two implementations: one in Java and one in C++.

You need to pay perpetual rents to host on the old-web: you need to pay rent to a DNS-registrar and you need to pay rent for a publicly-routable IP address; you're also coerced into paying rents for compute-time in a data-center (it's often cheaper than paying for a publicly-routable IP address which are priced for businesses). These are economic-burdens that exist purely for rent extraction. You can host your own Lemmy instance over I2P (and/or GNUnet) on your own machines on the data-connection you already pay for right now. The additional cost is $0.00 (excluding the increased compute-burden on your machines). If you data-connection already grants you a public routable address you can use OpenNIC for a free or self-administered domain that is accessible over the old-web. The software exists. Users need to deploy it, use it and agitate for it.

I will be using solar-panels, batteries and arm CPUs running GNU/Linux to host content over I2P and GNUnet. The compute becomes free. The only cost that remains is the nominal amount required for a consumer-connection. Using software like I2P and GNUnet on your own hardware on your data-connection--that you're using to read this--is the closest thing we have to "no-barrier" self-hosting or decentralising. The reality is that's a significant information barrier and I am surprised that no-one has made a mobile-computer 'app' for self-hosting blogs/forums that runs a I2P-router in the background for non-technical users. I type that... but I know why it probably hasn't been done (if it hasn't): Google's Android will kill any long-running background process... and Apple would not let you publish it.