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You can start somewhere and then if you see that it doesn't stick around you can easily move your account to a different server and take all your followers with you, it's build into the software. In that sense it's even nicer than email where you need to tell everyone that you moved on to a different email-address manually.

I donated to the admin's Patreon account in excess of his hosting fees. But, that didn't cover his time, apparently. The admin is still active on GitHub after the server crashed; I guess he just lost interest.

Does mastodon have a tool that can create regular back ups to email to you??? Seems relevant for a common problem like this

On my instance I can (manually) request a backup every 7 days. It would be nice if this could be automated but it's all media etc. so it's quite big for email. If the admin would have announced that they would switch off the server you could have moved easily which is possible at least since v3.0

No, not currently.