TBH I would be more concerned if a majority if LN nodes were using residential IP addresses. Then, the LN gossip network would basically become a hit list for wrench attacks. Better to use an IP from a large company or the veil of Tor for home nodes. BTW, the majority of nodes are Tor only.

"Sufficient decentralization" does not mean that everyone and all capital IS PERFECTLY and UNIFORMLY distributed. It just means you have the option to be less connected if you want. Economies of scale are real and people are free to take advantage of them. The network remains decentral as long as there is choice and switching costs aren't prohibitive.

Similar to mining pools, its almost trivial to migrate an LN node to another host, or use another VPN provider for the node's IP if the one you're using starts to misbehave.

I would like to add a nuance. Remember that there is no such thing as The Lightning Network, just like there is no such thing as The Mempool.

You can happily build a small network with those around you and keep it isolated without any issues. Less exciting, but it works. There could be a number of people using it privately in this fashion without anybody else knowing. It would surely make sense for large players, like exchanges, to have their own connections that they use among themselves for settlement. And for these nodes and channels to remain private, only known by those involved.

Having said that, due to game theory, at some point someone will probably connect you to the rest of the world even if you try to stay isolated.

Decentralization is not an end, it's a means. What are you looking for decentralization to give it.

Misleading title and content. You better start reading our fellow Darth guides https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/omg-ln-nodes-are-running-on-amazon

This is not metrics for decentralization. Because we can quantify it and it will be different for different amounts.

That means for 10K payment it is not important if node has 1M or 10M channels, so it must be lower bound and connectivity will have nothing to do with large players. More cheap alternative routes will be available.

Some nodes are hosted at home, but tunnel through a cloud service. This will look like they're running in the cloud, but they are not. Check out PlebVPN

Majority of nodes are behind Tor. You don't see those in that overview.

Node runners use what they know per the centralised cloud providers, given time they can migrate to decentralized ones

This image is misleading as it does not count nodes that are behind Tor.

Still, we need more decentralization.

Is there a way to know how many nodes are running on TOR?