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A reminder in the age of the Fediverse: if you're not the customer, you're still the product.
(slrpnk.net)
OP was taking about Tumblr, but I think it applies even more to the Fediverse: users need to develop an ethos of paying to support the sites they use. Otherwise advertisers pay the bills and call the shots.
There's two parts to this problem often overlooked, that on one side, is down to whomever runs an instance and two, the larger hosting industry (and by extension, the developers of kbin/lemmy/mastodon/etc).
The admins often have a tendency for vying for their instance to be the biggest and bestest. Stop that, grow the communities you have an interest in supporting instead of just wanting to be the biggest instance. Don't use this as a penis extender. You're not helping. And this idea of being the biggest just gives us another Reddit or Twitter instead of a federated network of systems.
The hosting industry is milking the ever living daylights out of servers and resources. Cheaper hosting will make hosting new instances much less reliant on sponsors and the like. Add to that that domain registrars are also milking the ever living daylights out of domain registrations.
Ofcourse, the developers of the fediverse apps optimizing their code as much as can be done without falling behind on general development, which reduces the resources needed to host an instance, helps in that regard too.
Just saying people need to foot the bills, without first looking if those bills are actually necessary and just, just shifts the blame on the users.
blahaj.zone provided an example of this recently. They reported that their finances are no longer sustainable but reassured their users that things will be fine because the fix was straightforward ... move everything off of AWS to a cheaper hosting provider.
Adding to the problem is ISPs.
I personally was part of putting fiber in the ground in my country from 2007-2011, there has been fiber in the ground up to peoples doorsteps and fiber connections between all street level hubs, since then.
It's only now, since 2022, that for an obscene premium compared to cable and copper, you can get fiber as a domestic subscriber, STILL limited to 1/1G and with fair use limits (going over 100GB in a day gets you throttled to a snails pace).
And even though the technology is present and available to go well beyond 1/1G, no ISP will provide.
There's plenty people with hardware at home capable of hosting substantial sized instances for federated systems. They just can't get the bandwidth to do so.
And with can't, make sure to understand this is in no way a technical limitation.
It's 100% down on restrictions by ISPs and "the industry", they don't want people to have that capability to host content themselves.