I don’t want to say anything inflammatory since something terrible might have happened to Tom that we don’t know - but it’s definitely not OK to start a community like this, get everyone on-board and established, then fail to appoint admins and disappear without explanation (even if busy) leaving other people to pick up the pieces, unless there’s a very good reason.
And to be honest I’m surprised I seem to be the only one saying that - maybe an explanation from him (if appropriate to share) would smooth things over. I was genuinely excited about the new instance as an opportunity for the UK communities on Lemmy to put a bad situation behind us and move on.