I honestly would've preferred a referral program where you could get a pre-configured vps at your chosen vps provider (where the end user can choose from vps providers such as Hetzner, Glesys and so on), and that the referrer (mastodon, friendica, piefed, lemmy or mbin) gets a small cut out of every monthly payment.
Though I'm not sure how to make that an intriguing deal for the vps providers.

Centralizing the decentralized web at one provider sounds counter productive.

[–] andypiper@lemmy.world 10 points 4 days ago

Completely agree that this "feels like" a centralisation vector. That's not the intent of it, and if you read the blog post we make it clear that we want many Mastodon servers, everywhere, rather than one organisation hosting them all. This is to do two things - 1) get us a more sustainable financial foundation that is less dependent on grant cycles and 2) enable the larger institutions (EU Commission being an existing example) to get set up on the Fediverse.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Even if they were to use a single cloud for the managed instances, this is not at all like the centralization of platform ownership. Here's the critical difference.

If something happens to Twitter, say a methhead buys it and turns it into a propaganda machine, its users can only stop using it and/or move elsewhere. For this to have a significant effect, the a large part of the network of people has to move. Every individual has to do non-trivial amount of labour to do so. That's hard.

If something happens to the cloud provider hosting some sizeable Mastodon server, the owner of the server can migrate (copy) the instance to another cloud provider, or their own hardware, switch the DNS records and shutdown the old one. Their users would only notice a brief interruptin. There's no significant labour needed by the users, apart from perhaps logging in again. Only a much smaller amount of labour by the instance owner, compared to the labour needed for mass user migration performed by individual users.

And that's the major difference that fundamentally changes the dynamics.