Hacker News Reader

You are technically correct. The best kind of correct!

I've never heard of that term before... is there a good resource for reading up on federated servers/networks/design (I'm not even sure which of those three terms is the most appropriate here).

The StackExchange network is an example of federation. All of the various sites have unique userbases and data sets, with a system for authorizing and trusting a user's identity between the lot of them.

Otherwise, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_%28information_techn... for a general discussion.

Classic examples of federated systems: email, usenet, IRC, Jabber, DNS, BGP.

I would argue that if built upon a platform like MaidSafe, which should come out late 2014/early 2015, it would be a decentralized network.

You certainly could do it decentralized, but I suspect federated is the better fit.