I mean, I get where you’re going with this, but as much as we’d like adequate public transit in the US, it’s simply not going to happen fast enough for people to not buy cars any more. Prices will keep going up as long as people keep buying, and I don’t see that stopping any time soon.

I feel like I might be too cynical in this, but demand is a strange thing, especially in a heavily corporatized country like the States. A less mobile workforce due to more and more folks not being able to afford individual transportation anymore will at some point result in more lobbying from businesses for alternative transport solutions.
But you’re right, that might just be wishful trickle-down thinking and from my understanding the States’ problem lies more with inherently car-centry city planning anyway and not with just a lack of busses or trains. That is hard to fix.

cars are getting more expensive

Good! 😜

Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo

Doesn’t that just mean federation instance maintainers are self-selected among those members of the community who can afford them in the first place? It’s just a less distributed form of a donation system. Instead of relying on 50 people making a 1$ donation each to pay a 50$ hosting bill, you rely on one person (the maintainer of the instance) making a single 50$ donation. That the maintainer wants to donate is already established, how much they can afford to donate can always be reflected by how much they’re willing to let their instance grow.
That doesn’t bode well for the longevity of any single instance, but I’ve always assumed the general idea was to have as many small instances as possible anyway instead of few big ones, otherwise what’s the point of federation. And if you avoid big instances then there will never be a need to funnel funds into big hosting bills.