The safest way to do this is to add your off instance account as a moderator.

If I see a mod that hasn't been active for a year, I'm probably not going to reach out before removing you. It'd be nice and I've done it in the past, but it's a lot of maintenance overhead when we have as many abandoned communities as we do.

Another thing that helps is keeping your report queue clear. That's the biggest thing that prompts us to look at inactive mods.

Worth knowing that when I give a community to a new mod, I send a PM to the existing/previous mod (who appears to have been idle for months or years) - becuse nothing is necessarily permanent. If someone does come back, we'll talk about reinstating them - hopefully working with the new mod because the more the merrier. I've only had one reply so far and it was to say "fair enough, let them have it" lol

Can only speak for lemmy.world, but figured it's worth saying :)

That's fair if they're obscure, and if there are extra mods (or at least an attempt to get some). Like, I wanted to start c/plantarfascitis, and yeah, that would be dead.

However, some of the communities I took over, I took them over because there was only 1 mod, who had never even posted to that community, and they weren't obscure topics (debian, redhat and Fedora actually)... And, the mod had never even posted

fedora and debian has so much happening constantly, it shouldn't be dead for months.. And I feel that if the mod hasn't used them in 2 years, maybe its time to pass it on