I appreciate the call for democracy, but I think this totally misses the point of federation with it’s complaint that not everybody is going to host their own server. The benefit of federation is not that every individual or small group will run their own server, it’s that there will be multiple server options to choose from so if the one you’re using goes bad you can just switch to another one. Even just getting to an email like system with a few major players and many smaller ones would be a big improvement over a single centralized server, but what makes Mastodon style federation even better than that is that you can move your account from one server to another in a way you really can’t for email.

They don’t complain that not everybody will host their own server, quite the opposite:

Nor is it enough to “save ourselves”, self-hosting our own decentralised digital islands, while ignoring the reality of the masses. We cannot close our eyes and rest, content with freedom in our personal bubble, ignoring the reality of our non-technical friends and family who do not enjoy the same luxuries of privacy and free speech.

What I think they’re saying is that over time, people gravitate to the biggest instance (which seems to be happening right now with lemmy.world), which can lead to effects that work against the goals of decentralization.

I’m not sure that they are personally advocating for anything particularly precise, but in the end of the article it mentions Wikipedia as an inspiration for the “information democracy” model.