Stake With Friends or Pools

I'm thinking about setting up a validator because I'm afraid too many of the validators are in pools (centralized). But I don't have 32 ETH, I have some friends with a few ETH that we could all pitch in to get to 32.

Should we do it? What is the distribution of validators? Are there enough individuals running validators?

Can bad validators validate a block if they are all in the same pool? I wouldn't want to contribute to a pool that already have a large percentage of the validators.

Other than pools what can I do?