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"varying" is a pretty wide range here. If you mean "trust" as in trust to maintain connectivity, yes, but beyond that there are established ways to create secure channels over untrusted networks. Could you provide specifics about what you mean if anything beyond basic connectivity?

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Sure: what is the process to start downloading a torrent? what is the process to message someone on Jami? what is the process to call someone on (old) Skype or Jitsi? Answer this and you realize you can only get as decentralized as your hardware infrastructure

Well for torrent it starts by contacting one of the various trackers that know other peers. It's not centralized but there's only a couple of trackers out there.

There's no trust between any of the peers, but each of the torrent piece has associated hash, meaning peers cannot give you invalid data without being caught (unless hash collision occurs).

Peers can be discovered with DHT magic, but ultimately, can only be dialed if the ISP allows peers to receive connections.

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