That's of course the downside of a federated internet model run by many individual administrators. Nowadays, there are very large instances that are funded, and

That's of course the downside of a federated internet model run by many individual administrators. Nowadays, there are very large instances that are funded, and are very unlikely to just up and disappear. Also, running your own instance is actually not that hard nowadays. Digital Ocean has a provisioned option where it's a one click set up. Mastodon also has the option to do import and export right in the UI. So, you can easily export your network graph now. Migrating between instances has explicit support now as well https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on... And I think these improvements show that community run services like this do listen to the users, and evolve to make them more user friendly over time.