Feels a bit like mastodon needs to come with load testing tools? If only to give smaller admins a quantifiable sense of what level their instance turns into a flaming ball
Or Mastodon admins needs to publish a bit more numbers about what kind of instances they run on what kind of hardware, so people know what to expect at what stages.
That's coming. The infosec.exchange admin has been tooting what's going on to some extent, but delayed until now the full documentation in favor of gaining headroom for the incoming growth.
Also, Mastodon needs a better handle on its "range" of scale: a lot of the core contributors of Mastodon get focused on the performance of the two massive "flagship" instances (mastodon.social/mastodon.online). Those have far different scaling needs than most of the smaller instances and sometimes the admin work needed for smaller instances gets overlooked because the "flagship" scale handles it just fine.
Mastodon should probably throttle signups by default so new users can't pile on to servers.
You understand there is no central authority for this, though, right? Many instances are growing, and account creation is a per-instance concept. The instance in the article is relatively small but it's impacted by activity coming from other, larger instances.
I would rather encourage migration and let the admin provide links to similar instances.
This has happened. Lots of servers, including the ones run by the Mastodon project, are now closed to new users. If you want an account on a Mastodon server then you pretty much need to set one up yourself, or know someone crazy enough to think joining the Holy Order Of Social Plumbers sounds like a good thing.