Try to be able to comfortably run a half marathon. This time last year I set the same goal but for 10k and I've definitely hit that goal, but want to go further.
I think generally it's calmed down over the past 12 months and don't see so much shitty behaviour like we used to. There would be a tendency for them to jump onto a thread and swarms of them would dogpile onto people spamming them with pictures and antagonize people.
Same. I don't know why people keep trying to use the email example, personally I found it too much of an abstract concept that doesn't necessarily work for Lemmy.
If I knew someone used Reddit then I'd just say it's like Reddit but instead of a single authority in charge of Reddit, anyone can take the Reddit software and host it themselves, and if you create an account on one site you can still subscribe to subreddits on other sites and vote and comment on posts.
It is. Go into your account settings -> blocks and at the bottom is a section for blocking instances.
I've got Lemmy.ml in there. You'll still see comments from their users and posts from users in other communities but you shouldn't see any of their communities in your feed.
Monthly Active Users (MAU) is probably the best metric for the health of Lemmy. A lot of these instances that are shutting down may be single-user instances or ones that people spun up just to mess about with them.
However, please donate to your instance if you can, it doesn't have to be much :)
Have you got a particular country in mind or are you referring to EU elections?