I doubt it. You really are relying on the word of another person in that situation. I feel like a best case scenario is multiple admins with backups.

If it’s only been a few weeks though I wouldn’t be too concerned. Chances are the admin isn’t making their living off of Lemmy so they could be preoccupied with work, family, a vacation, or some other thing.

You’d probably be able to tell if a Lemmy instance is coming back based off of how long it’s been around and if there’s some kind of stickied post about what they want the instance to be.

Is there anything built in to Lemmy that would allow a takeover if a big instance went under?

No, and that’s why I treat every account I open on a single admin account as a throwaway that could disappear tomorrow

If your only lemmy account resides on that instance, then I would encourage you to download LASIM (Lemmy Account Settings Instance Migrator) (source: github.com/CMahaff/lasim ) and run that to export all your subscriptions. I’d also encourage you to set up one or two more lemmy backup accounts on other instances and import your user subscriptions and settings to those other instances. Doing this now, while your current instance is still running, would save you a lot of pain and suffering later if that instance you are using is just shut down or deleted.

Since lemmy instances are owned fully by their admins, there’s no concept of allowing a hostile takeover of someone else’s instance. Just the thought of this is a little absurd and would already have been exploited for wrongdoing if it were possible.

Probably like me and our instance, it runs as an extra on a company server, there’s no risk of it going down, it’s negligible for costs.

It’s just been one of the most popular months for vacation, gone on vacation, will update Lemmy instance to latest version when get around to it.