You can't ask people to join small servers that have the biggest risk of shutting down without creating migration toola thst migrate all the content along the likes and comments

• Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)

This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.

It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say... Just like an email address or URL.

Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.

We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.

Let’s get rid of open registration instances

How?

Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is going to stop them. Some already have

But isn't the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?

You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can't "get rid of open registration instances." That's just stupid.

The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.

If it was an exceptional case, I'd be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.

then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve

This is the natural end result of every volunteer run instance, you don't find it odd that over the last 40 years of the internet not one fediverse like server or community has survived or even been mildly popular?

I'll repost this because for some reason the other post got deleted, it was regarding lemm.ee shutting down, they were concerned that one of the largest Lemmy instances is shutting down and the future of Lemmy:

You're 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:

Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort 'for free' is a huge ask.

The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network... for free... is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.

You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it's a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing

This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money

And then they can simply pay for the hard costs like hosting costs/bandwidth and people to do the shit no one wants to.

The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.

Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small