FediDB has listed the overall Lemmy monthly active users at about 45k for a while now. It's anyone's guess how many actual humans that represents, since the number includes bots and alt accounts.
That number only includes accounts that post, comment, or vote. I would love to know how many silent lurkers are out there.
Northwest US: smoked salmon with a side of berries. Sockeye with little or no sugar added is the best IMO. The berries should be native varieties if you want to try for authenticity, though the invasive blackberries are really tasty, too.
Friendly reminder: this community has a "No politics or political figures" rule. In the future, please put posts like this in a community like !politicalhumor@lemmy.world.
Yes, sorry. My reply wandered off track a bit. In my defense, it was late and I should have been sleeping instead of spending time on Lemmy.
In short, all I meant to say is that I generally agree with your proposal, and we do have a history of announcing and discussing defederations in advance in some cases, but I wouldn't make it a blanket rule.
Of course that's purely my personal opinion. If the rest of the community feels differently (including the other admins) then I'm all ears.
Transparency is good. But I'm not sure announcing or voting on each defederation is necessary.
In cases where there is concern about another instance's culture or general user behavior then an announcement or even a vote may be appropriate. We have done this in the past for exploding-heads (link) and threads (link).
However, most of the instances on our block list either (a.) allow pedo/loli/CSAM type content, or (b.) are unmoderated/abandoned instances where spammers set up shop. In those cases we just hit the block button and move on with our day. We have sometimes made announcements (link), but not consistently. In the case of a CSAM-friendly instance I would not want to give them free advertising by making a public announcement.
If you are ever curious why a particular instance was defederated, look at our Fediseer profile below. We try to keep the Censures list up to date with our instance block list, and note the rationale for blocking each instance. And if you see something odd in that list please let us know. At least once an instance was unblocked after a user brought it to our attention (link).
I expect a substantial portion of that cow pasture/range land is dry grasslands and shrub steppe out west. It's rough terrain and not good for much else. A lot of it doesn't even have cows on it most of the time.
I think it was supposed to be Sidereal, which refers to astronomical measurements based on stars rather than the sun. But he couldn't even spell it right.
If money is no object you can buy your own custom-built private car and pay Amtrak to pull it on their lines.