I ran into a similar problem with snapshots of a forum and email server – if there are scheduled emails when you take the snapshot they get sent out again if you create a new test server from the snapshot. And similarly for the forum.
I’m not sure what the solution is either. The emails are sent via an SMTP so it’s not as simple as disabling email (ports, firewall, etc.) on the new test server.
Hopefully people will start going back to independent forums. Google just added a “forums” tab at the top of their search, so they seem to want that too. It’s not good for them that so much information is private on chat programs like Discord, other big social media sites, and concentrated on Reddit.
Lemmy never shows up in search results for me despite some instances having good domain authority, but more people should start using it when it starts showing up.