Oooh I love cooking with mint. It’s great with lamb, but it works with so many kinds of dishes!

Here are some ideas:

Mash it up and add it to some lemon juice, super refreshing summertime drink.

Tabouleh is a very simple salad that includes mint, this is a goto of mine, works as a side dish with just about anything and is a great way to use up your herbs (if you’re growing mint, you know what I mean, it can quickly get out of control)

Add some mint to your pesto for a fresh take.

Sprinkle some mint on roasted green beans.

Watermelon chunks with feta and chopped mint. Soo good. Might freak you out, doesn’t make sense to the typical American palate, but it’s amazing.

That’s a very cool concept. I’d definitely be willing to participate in a platform that has that kind of trust system baked in, as long as it respected my privacy and couldn’t broadcast how much time I spend on specific things etc. Instance owners would also potentially get access to some incredibly personal and lucrative user data, so protections would have to be strict. But I guess there are a lot of ways to get at positive user engagement in a non-invasive way. I think it could solve a lot of current and potential problems. I wish I was confident the majority of users would be into it, but I’m not so sure.

For sure, it’s not an easy problem to address. But I’m not willing to give up on it just yet. Bad actors will always find a way to break the rules and go under the radar, but we should be making new rules and working to improve these platforms in good faith, with the assumption that most people want healthy communities that follow the rules.

I think by default bots should not be allowed anywhere. But if that’s a bridge too far, then their use should have to be regularly justified and explained to communities. Maybe it should even be a rule that their full code has to be released on a regular basis, so users can review it themselves and be sure nothing fishy is going on. I’m specifically thinking of the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot (I know, I harp on it too much). It’s basically a spammer bot at this point, cluttering up our feeds even when it can’t figure out the source, and providing bad and inaccurate information when it can. And mods refuse to answer for it.

I haven’t used Mojeek, so I can’t speak to that, but the UK has some of the worst privacy protections and mass-surveillance anywhere. They’re also part of the Five Eyes, so I wouldn’t count the fact that they’re UK-based as a point in their favor.

I just subbed, thanks. This is kind of my fundamental challenge with this platform, though. I don’t want to miss anything on the subjects I’m interested in, so I sub to every instances’ version of the same community. I’m probably doing it wrong, but if I sub to just one small sub-community because I like the mods, or the lack of bots, I feel like I’d be missing a lot of content.

I agree, it’s already happening. The Media Bias Fact Checker bot is another example. Nobody I’ve interacted with wants it, it is functionally useless and inaccurate, and appears to be a cash grab (though we can’t know for sure, because the mods refuse to openly discuss it with users). We live in a capitalist society, so even platforms like Lemmy are subject to its pressures, and require active pushback from users to prevent profits from taking precedence over user satisfaction on larger instances.

how do they know?

I have to know now, this is bugging the hell out of me. Is it an estimate based on daily downloads? Do they get a ping when you connect to the internet, and if so, why would they count that as a boot? If I boot this on an air gapped laptop, there’s no way they could ever know, right? So many questions. Regardless, this seems like a weird thing for them to brag about.