@cwebber On the other side of the coin we have https://identi.ca/mlinksva who has said a couple of times that large flagship nodes are the only thing that could be powerful and convenient enough to fight the big social silos. I'm not so sure.
Regardless if we try to solve centralization with federation or we believe true peer-to-peer is key, we need to solve #userops. From what I read, the people who are closing their OStatus nodes these days, be they Mastodon or GNU Social, are mainly doing it due to the burden of maintaining them.