Small instances owned by individuals would be very vulnerable.
If the owner died (yes, morbid), then all user accounts created through that instance could easily disappear if the owner did not have a contingency plan.
Is there any set up that would allow for redundancy? Like two or three folks could all host the instance in some shared way such that if one owner disappeared, the instance wouldn’t be lost?
Of course, larger instances run by organizations can have their own redundancy plans, but more wondering if there are any existing features that allow for a few random folks to share the burden without having to coordinate on access to a AWS account or something like that.
Not built-in to Lemmy, but you could archive backups of the code, pictures, db files, etc. using something like SyncThing, which keeps two folders on two machines up to date constantly.
For the database I’d back it up to a file then sync that since it can be messy syncing it otherwise.