I also have an account on another instance. The sole admin hasn’t been heard of for three weeks. There don’t seem to have been any mod actions for a month and the instance hasn’t been updated to the latest version.
At the moment I’m more concerned about the admin (I hope they are okay). But what would happen if they don’t show up? I guess eventually the instance would disappear without warning or be defederated if bad actors take over.
Is there anything built in to Lemmy that would allow a takeover if a big instance went under?
Lemmy instances are no different to any other website, in this regard. To ‘take over’ an instance would be to take over hosting of a website - which would mean either re-pointing the DNS somewhere else (and getting a copy of the database), or to take over the hosting of it (e.g. if it is hosted with a cloud provider, or you are physically taking possession of the hardware).
Taking over the DNS in nearly any gTLD or ccTLD (short of some kind of compromise at least) generally requires one of the following: 1) a process initiated by the registrant, or 2) proving that you are the registrant, or 3) proving you owned the trademark in the domain before it was registered or 4) waiting until the domain expires, any grace period is up, and then being first to register the domain.
If the admin is completely gone, and they are the individual owner of the instance, you could wait for (4) and try to drop-catch the domain. But domains are generally registered for a minimum of 1 year, and often up to 10 in advance, so it could be a long wait. And even then, you wouldn’t have a copy of the database. It is quite possible the actual hosting of the instance has not been pre-paid for anywhere near that long (or might fail in any number of ways, or fall out of date and get compromised, or need some kind of manual intervention following a problem), so it could go down and not come back up a long time before the domain name expires.
If the admin has made same arrangements in advance for takeover of the instance in case they are unable to continue, the picture can be a lot better. They might, for example, if they created a legal structure (company, not-for-profit organisation) for the instance, and that is the registrant and owner of cloud resources etc…, then maybe other members of the organisation could call a Special General Meeting (or whatever similar procedure the org’s rules set up in advance say), appoint a new president, and then the new president can prove their authority to any providers involved to get access to the organisation’s resources (e.g. hosting server). Or maybe they could set up a dead-man’s switch system to automatically email credentials for all the resources if they don’t check in for a couple of weeks; or give a few trusted people the credentials (possibly encrypted with something like Shamir’s Secret Sharing to ensure n of m trusted friends - e.g. any 7 of 10 or something, need to combine their secrets to get the credentials) to take over the instance. But any of those things would require they have planned for that eventuality in advance.
Otherwise, of course, all users of the instance could just chose another instance (possibly posting a last message with a public key to that instance, to establish the link to their new account).