This seems really great to me. Even with Digital Ocean's pre-baked Mastodon deployment, there's still a good amount of operational overhead and cost. People lament centralization, but there's plenty of choices for people who want various levels of independence.

The Fediverse is like email. There's Gmail and other completely hosted providers. I'm sure there are services that are out of the box but deployed to cloud infra. And you can self-host if you really want.

I hope a lot of the big players enter the space. That would help prevent embrace-and-extinguish.