I’ve noticed a few communities where the mods haven’t ever contributed to the community (and its dead), or / and haven’t even posted anything to lemmy in years.
Just a FYI, you can ask Lemmy World admins to takeover ownership of communities community and actively moderate it, to help revive it
It seems there were a few people who simply grabbed the community names when Lemmy grew, and had to plans to contribute to them.
Some of the communities that were affected , I’ve seen have a lot of potential (like some of the larger linux distros).
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.