I agree, they should freeze registration until they can get more people to volunteer to manage it, that is updates, maintenance, and especially moderation. I’ve never done maintenance or updates on a Lemmy server and I wouldn’t trust myself with something so dangerous, but I have done moderation and I would be happy to volunteer to help out in any way I could.
Another thing that could help is to make the instance SDF member only, by requiring the use of SDF email, or having your account be managed by the maint command in the Shell login.
One idea I had would be that they could require accounts to have SDF emails, that would basically require people to have Validated TTY accounts, I believe social.sdf.org does this. They could also accomplish the same thing by closing registration completely and having it be solely managed via the Maint command in the TTY shell.