I'm willing to take ownership of any mastodon instance if some admin cannot continue or doesn't feel like it. (like, for free and without too many changes)
Excluding single user instances ofc, but I think if it's an open one users should come first anyway, and admins should have a proper way out without telling everyone to leave.
...and I'm between having to watch servers all day and getting paid fairly for it, more work is good. :p
And centralization lowers costs and makes the common infrastructure better.
Note: here I'm not saying centralization is 100% the way to go, I love extreme decentralization but we have to be realistic too.
Decentralization is mostly inefficient and overcomplicated, and this applies to all problems. Bitcoin is a perfect extreme example of power waste due to decentralization. Compared to a more centralized infrastructure (-> credit cards), Bitcoin is exponentially more wasteful with network size. In a terrifying way.
Same rules applies to Mastodon instances, I'm sure there is a sweet spot in instance size where it's nicely balanced between efficiency and decentralization, and I think that size is "pretty big, but still many instance in the network".
Very dependant on available hosting services and their own efficiency, trust, global economy and people's skill at maintaining instances. And probably many other things.
I also think everything can be perfectly decentralized and efficient; it's just not the case of Mastodon (or any federated thing) or Bitcoin (or (nearly) all current blockchains).
But I still worship DHTs and love the fact that with enough math on top of it you can solve nearly anything.
It's much harder to do, but possible.
For great examples you can look at BitTorrent's DHT or Freenet. They scale extremely well, they can be extremely robust and even anonymous. All that while managing redundancy for efficiency without making the network weaker. That's a model I like.
