Here is the clearest, simplest explanation of why 25,000 people is the recommended maximum federation size in Solon Papageorgiou’s framework—and why going larger begins to weaken the system’s strengths.
🌍 Why 25,000 Is the Maximum Recommended Federation Size
Solon Papageorgiou’s system is designed around small, human-scale communities (150–300-person villages) that cooperate in a decentralized federation.
The federation exists only to enable the things a single village cannot efficiently do alone: specialty care, advanced fabrication, higher education networks, supply resilience, etc.
But the federation must stay small and human-manageable to preserve three core principles:
✅ 1. Above 25,000 People, It Stops Feeling Like a Network of Villages
A federation of 25,000 people equals about 80–90 villages (if villages average ~275 people).
At this point:
Everyone can still know of each village by identity, reputation, and character.
Villages can maintain personal relationships, not anonymous bureaucracy.
Federation meetings, councils, and coordination circles are still small, fast, and relational.
Once you grow beyond ~25,000:
The network becomes too large to be held in collective memory.
Trust becomes less interpersonal and more abstract.
Coordination risks drifting toward bureaucracy.
The magic of the system relies on recognition, trust, and reputation—not administration.
✅ 2. Trust Networks Stop Scaling Cleanly Beyond ~150 Villages
Human cooperation (even in highly collaborative systems) hits natural limits:
Persistent familiarity networks top out at roughly 100 nodes.
Beyond that, participants lose clarity about who contributes, who needs support, who leads which circles, etc.
A federation with more than ~150 villages needs:
Layers
Sub-councils
Meta-councils
Coordinators
And these layers begin to look like the very hierarchical systems micro-utopias are meant to dissolve.
Thus 25,000 is not arbitrary—it’s where social-coordination complexity flips into administrative complexity.
✅ 3. Federation Services Scale Efficiently Up to 25k—Then Hit Diminishing Returns
Micro-utopian federations share:
Specialty healthcare
Advanced fabrication workshops
Training academies
Knowledge commons
Research hubs
Cultural exchanges
Mobile surgical teams
Emergency mobilization networks
These systems run best when serving a few tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands.
Beyond ~25,000 people, three problems arise:
Specialty services become centralized instead of distributed.
Travel distances for cross-village services increase.
Communities become resource sinks instead of resource nodes.
Efficiency peaks between 15,000 and 25,000 people.
✅ 4. Above 25,000 People, Culture Drifts and Fragments Faster
Micro-utopian culture—non-coercion, contribution-not-measurement, high autonomy—depends on:
Shared ethos
Shared expectations
Shared language for conflict resolution
Directly learned norms
When scale exceeds 25,000:
cultural drift accelerates
subcultures become unaligned
shared meaning becomes diluted
federation identity becomes abstract
Small, dense federations remain coherent for decades.
Extremely large ones start fracturing into incompatible cultural clusters.
✅ 5. 25,000 People = Maximum That Can Still Govern Itself Without Governance
A core feature of the system is post-governance organization:
No centralized authority
No enforcement
No bureaucracy
No coercive laws
Only reputation, norms, and relational networks
This works beautifully at 150–300 people (villages)
and still works at 10,000–25,000 people (federations).
Beyond that number, however:
reputation systems become too diffuse
norms stop being reinforced by familiarity
mediation circles scale poorly
coordination begins drifting toward rules and roles
To stay post-governance, the federation must remain human-sized.
🌟 The Sweet Spot: 10,000–25,000 People
This is the size where:
Villages feel like sovereign, intimate homes
Federation services reach maximum benefit
Culture stays stable
Coordination stays relational
No formal governance emerges
No coercion appears
No metrics, money, or bureaucracy are needed
In other words:
👉 Below 25,000 = “Human-scale freedom.”
👉 Above 25,000 = “Risk of proto-government.”
That’s why 25,000 is the outermost safe boundary.
