I'm fine with criticisms of the fediverse, my issue with this article is how the author repeatedly makes these negative comparisons of the existing fediverse to some 'dream' of what it is supposed to be like that seemingly exists only in the author's own head. You can see in each of my quotes where the author makes claims about how the fediverse should be much more decentralized than it actually is to live up to that dream, even if he doesn't necessarily claim to agree with that dream himself. As to the "does three equal one" question - clearly having three big instances sharing half the space and a long tail of thousands the other half is a very different scenario from having a single dominant instance.