I think they meant servers as in the machine hosting the content you are acessing, such as the machine that hosts HN. Not that every connection goes through a central server, but your content is hosted on a central server, as opposed to FreeNet where your content is distributed and so can't be taken down like a server can.
Sometimes I take time from some task to do things like this, but as this time off isn't a regular ocurrence, once it does happen, it ends up taking a lot of time, making me feel like I'm delaying an assignment. Small but regular steps like this could help with this feeling.