I understand that defederating is part of running an instance and that decisions are not always clear cut. If I were an admin, I'd report newly defederated instances in a post or something. It doesn't seem like appreciably more work than what being an admin already entails (which must be a lot!) and makes things transparent. I'm here in the Fediverse because I don't like what's going on on the rest of the big tech internet, and I want to get involved in an alternate model. Hearing that a politically aligned instance was silently defederated on .ca reminds me of what I am hoping to distance myself from online versus find more of now. Ditto for the the downvotes without replies. That said, other commenters have helped me see site maintenance as opposed to political orientation reasons that could motivate defederation. On reflection, I think I want to get involved in an expressly curated (in a way that I approve of) and/or pretty transparent Fediverse environment