Considering how this game seems to revolve around 'build it yourself' gameplay in a persistent world,
considering the fact that the official server is the main usage of the developed game,
considering how long it take to develop a server so it has a lot of interesting human made structures,
It would seem to be of strategic importance to have an official server. Ideally this would be a fairly professional service (dedicated server?).
Right now the 'official' server is a server of your friend? Don't get me wrong, the server is great, but minetest as a project could really use at least one official server owned by the development team (basically one person now lol).