GarHot take: closing registrations on this instance will have been the secret sauce needed to make federation really take off, and others should follow pattern. Lots of instances with limited registration numbers is a good thing for now.
David@Gar yes, if only was very easy to spin up your own instance. Sadly, it isn’t.
@david I don't know that spinning up your very own is necessarily needed. It's nice yes but for the majority of casual tooters if there was just a generic pool of servers to pick from, and if that were the norm, it just might work.