I have literally never seen that bot in action. I saw a heap of deleted posts in a thread once, that was it.

Whatever they're doing to prevent it being obnoxious is working I reckon!

We're pretty protective of our ~500ish regulars. We are not a large instance, but our users are very engaged. We don't want them to be drowned out by a massive influx of new accounts utterly shifting the vibe of the site overnight.

It's already a problem of us both being Perth-based: we're weak on admin coverage first thing Eastern Time as that tends to be 3am-7am here. An explosion of users and an early morning incident is something it's just easier to avoid.

At the end of the day, we're a pair of nerdy full-time family guys doing this as a hobby. We aren't interested in monetising this site or making it our jobs.

Yeah, i think Lodions a great steady hand on the tiller. For me, i feel like AZ could become the basis for a wider 'fediverse first' set of social media alternatives for Australians. That would take more active growth and discussions and actions on direction in that vein. Lodion has a different vision to me on this projects development, and Lodions the lead on this experiment, and we've hashed that out before.

There are definitely practical, time consuming administrative hurdles that Lodion and Nath have highlighted that a user and cheerleader like me rarely notices, i think this is a key driver behind the non-listing. The only thing i can say to that is there seems a fairly technologically knowledgable and engaged set of people on AZ that might be willing to muck in to support the project in material administrative ways. There are some particular users that i'm surprised aren't admins from the beginning tbh, but thats my 'on the outside looking in' assessment of a situation i don't really know about.