That I can agree with. But I think it’s just inevitable growing pains. Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.

As they do, people will be left searching for instances to move to, and more and more, they’ll find that free instances just aren’t an available.

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.

That’s a decision for each server admin to decide for themselves. This particular admin has apparently decided that $5000/mo is worth it to them to run a server without ever asking people to pitch in, which I find absolutely bizarre, but whatever.

They can go a long way towards reducing that cost themselves by… asking their users to pitch in. Some people will pitch in, and reduce their out of pocket expenses. Others will leave, further reducing their out of pocket expenses.

If they haven’t done the bare minimum that they can do to help themselves, then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve.

And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.

Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else’s?

ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they’re using. Oh, the humanity.

If the polls close while you’re still in line, stay in line – you have the right to vote.

I feel like that is worded poorly. I think it should say something more like…

• If the closing time for the polls passes while you are in line, don’t panic. As long as you are in line before closing time, and stay in line, the polls will stay open long enough for you, and everyone else that was in line on time, to vote.

Granted it’s not as pithy, but the first version just gives me the mental image of a bunch of people belligerently standing in line in the dark at a locked door demanding to be let in.