IMO there's nothing wrong with passing the torch to a new maintainer, this is just part of the design of mastodon. People shouldn't arbitrarily trust an instanc

IMO there's nothing wrong with passing the torch to a new maintainer, this is just part of the design of mastodon. People shouldn't arbitrarily trust an instance maintainer on mastodon any more than they should trust google, twitter, fb, or a tor node with their data. The info they chose to share in plain text with a mastodon instance should be considered compromised. All that matters is the future; where will you send your data going forward? It's part of the design of mastodon that the maintainer can pass the admin role to a new maintainer, and if a user doesn't approve, they can migrate to a new instance. If other instances don't approve, they can blacklist it.