Is seeding strictly necessary? Borrowing from Diaspora, can't it be pods (now acting as data routers) that each node first connects to for establishing a peer-to-peer connection? Note, that this is just during the connection establishment phase (assuming TCP or higher level SPDY/QUIC), i.e the control plane and during the actual data transfer, the data can flow directly to the peer via a potentially secured connection (like a VPN?)

Of course, that would introduce some privileged nodes, but if anyone can create such a node, as part of protocol and be part of this data routing network, isn't that still a distributed egalitarian network?