Well, provided top level admin access to the server is still protected, a manual DB change ought to be rather doable right?

As for contacting the admins … the lead admin, ruud, is on mastodon and also admins one of the largest mastodon instances: mastodon.world. They are Dutch however, which means they’re likely asleep right now.

All of which raises the broader point about what good admin practice is. This is something the fediverse needs to get better at. In this case, as a bare minimum, every admin should be reachable at a location outside of their own instance.

Ideally, IMO, there’d be an “admin backline protocol” of some sort, where it’s super easy or even automatic that every admin of every instance can have an account on any instance they federate with for the purposes of communication etc.