Two things I can see, needs to be on scalable infrastructure rather than a few hosts running docker-compose. Needs to have support for in-memory key/value stores for caching. Either of these would probably help out a bit. Donate to the developers or instance maintainer and either could happen.
It will also help to evolve towards some form of immutable governance for the instances. By this I mean an instance should be more than the individual admin(s). If such an individual was to tire off, get distracted etc, the instance does not suffer the same fate. Technical federation is one thing. Federated governance is a whole different issue. I am not advocating for formal organizations (but those would help in some cases), but rather a clear provision for instance-continuity beyond the current admins.
Me and a handful of friends started a formally registered non profit in germany. Not internet related but art related stuff and it was surprisingly easy, fast and even more surprising the regulations and requirements actually make sense. That is the way to go to secure that no admin ever goes nuts and takes an entire instance with them lmao.
I‘m fairly certain that similar organizations exist in most countries snd the process should be relatively similar.
This is the way to go. Gives some reasonable grounds to commit to an instance when you expect it will be up in a month. We are also trying that with Baraza with a trusteeship kind of design.
I don't see this being a thing. In many cases, the admins own and pay for it. If they stop, it's not really like they'll just keep paying for it and have someone else run it.