As you all know, Lemmy is a rapidly evolving platform. That goes for those of us administering instances as well as users. As we grow and learn, it is occasionally necessary to restart the Lemmy instance to tweak settings.
Generally speaking, I'm able to set these changes up first, then click the button to restart the server, so the instance is down for less than a minute at a time. I think this is short enough that it's not worth making a post and waiting for an announced time for every restart. When/if I encounter a situation where I need to make more significant changes they will definitely be announced.
I would like to hear whether anyone has noticed and/or is bothered by occasional unannounced downtimes. If there's anyone out there that wants me to announce them first, I'm happy to do so when possible. The only cost is that it slows down my ability to iterate towards the ideal server config.