I’m considering starting a Lemmy instance with a limited federation model, and one of the things I’m thinking about from the start is how to support and maintain it as it grows, while spending as little attention as possible on the technical side of infrastructure management itself.

Because of that, I’m especially interested in hearing from admins who host Lemmy instances, particularly larger ones. I’d like to understand what your actual workflow looks like in practice: how you organize administration, what methodologies you use, how you handle backups, data recovery, upgrades, monitoring, and infrastructure maintenance in general. I’m also interested in whether there are any best practices or operational patterns that have proven reliable over time.

From what I’ve found so far, the official Lemmy documentation on backup and restore seems reasonably good for small instances, but as the instance grows, more nuances and complications appear. So ideally, I’d like to find or assemble something closer to a real guideline or runbook based on practices that are actually used by admins running larger instances.

If you run or have run a Lemmy instance, especially one that had to scale beyond a small personal or experimental setup, I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience. Even brief notes, links to documentation, internal checklists, or descriptions of what has and hasn’t worked for you would be very useful.