A while back I signed up to rammy.site a small lemmy instance run by a single person. It was a very nice instance, very stable and had pretty good access to other instances, or at least it used to.
Recently though all of that has changed when the instance was taken over by far right-wing users from the right-wing instance known as exploding-heads, an instance which has been blocked by many others for the hateful content they post and the abusive behavior of its members. The reason that this was even allowed to happen was that the admin stopped moderating the server but left the server online, this is a problem because it means that anyone can hop onto the server and start posting whatever they want and create whatever communities they want and no-one can stop them.
There isn't much you can do to prevent going innactive but there are ways to mitigate what happened on rammy.site to prevent a full blown catastrophe like what has happened here. If you run a server and you are going to be going away for a while I'd recommend turning off account registration and community creation on your instance, that wouldn't prevent federated users and existing users from spamming existing communities but it would help against users joining the site and creating new communities which is what happened here on rammy.
I understand that it's not always possible to always be there to moderate your instance but you can at lease take steps to ensure that in your absence the instance won't be utterly decimated and/or used as a weapon to spread hatred or attack other instances.
I admin a small instance as well and I have only blocked lemmynsfw.com at this point. I like to keep the server open to all unless a rule is broken on my server. This means even if I don’t agree with what is be said, again, as long as it is within the rules of the site.
It baffles me as to why you would go through the trouble of creating an instance and just leave it to rot with no oversight.
I can think of many reasons, you might die, you might suddenly go to jail, you might suddenly have to take care of loved ones, your computer might breakand no money for a new one, the possibilities are endless!
Of course. I’m sure we’ll see more of abandoned instances. Of course it could also be the admin doesn’t care either.
Second one seems very likely, the text in the sidebar implies that it's very hands off "Why trust some Big Tech corporation to host your data when some random geek can do it?". Also the instance went down for a few minutes when I tried to post something there on my old account but then miraculously came back up again, I'm not sure if Lemmy has automatic crash recovery so this might not be a good indicator.