The psychology of this problem is that users are too lazy to maintain multiple accounts when all they have is Lemmy’s stock web client. So they choose one of the big nodes: lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, lemm.ee, lemmy.ca, etc.

These Cloudflare-centralized nodes are able to greedily exploit the #networkEffect because due to lack of multi-account software. If there were some well-made 3rd party client apps for Lemmy that would be designed for multiple accounts, then more users would be willing to create accounts in more decentralized parts of the fedi.

Mastodon somewhat proves this because the client-side tooling is in place to make it convenient to have 6 or Mastodon accounts. And Mastodon nodes are better balanced.