only the home page and package search were unavailable - it was
not scheduled; but i assume that no one lost any peace of mind
due to the down-time of that one non-essential feature - there
was nothing important or remarkable to explain or to alert of

there is a bug tracker for server issues - transparency is
satisfied and evident by bug reports and mailing list discussions
- until someone opens a bug report for some problem or starts a
dev discussion on some topic, the problem or topic should be
assumed to be uninteresting - a few people warned of the
down-time on IRC, but no one opened a bug report - IMHO, that
was the appropriate level of "hair-on-fire" for this specific
circumstance

Understood

FWIW, the enthusiasm is appreciated - the general idea is of a
community-relations/publicity team which also over-sees the dev
process, reporting/blogging/vlogging about it to users, as well
as monitoring community feedback, and relaying any important
questions/concerns from the community to the dev team

parabola has a such community team - they are responsible
for monitoring this forum; but none of the current members are
very active - parabola devs are not required to read the forum -
that is why it is important for community members to read it,
and escalate important issues to bug reports or mailing list
discussions, in order to bring it to the attention of the devs

what is needed for any such project is only additional
volunteers to manage it - so rather than the "should we?"
question, the better question to ask is "can we?" and "who will
volunteer to over-see it?"

Thank you, I understand: the issue is manpower.

I was worried because community projects like Parabola live and die by community engagement, and someone tripping over the power cord could spell death for the project if nobody notices.
This was especially worrying because I know how easily FSDG distros can die, and there were no reassuring messages communicated on the mailing lists or forum like, "It's okay, someone just tripped over the power cord and it'll be fixed in no time!"

I think this hints at a deeper problem: we've got it totally backwards: the default should be 100% freedom, with the niche distro being the one that meticulously blacklists free programs and adds proprietary ones instead.
(Ideally there would be no proprietary software.)
Unfortunately, for the time being at least, the only thing we can do is carry on doing what we're doing with Parabola.

If we can't get Arch/Artix to comply with the FSDG, then we need to make the solution to the backwards problem a reality some other way: 100% freedom is the default, and add non-recommended and unsupported proprietary repos if you really, really want to.
The question is, "How do we get people to adopt this?"

Perhaps we could do a recruitment drive to teach Arch devs about freedom issues and spend a day or two learning how to fix Parabola issues?
We need to get to the stage where even 1 hour of downtime is on the radar of every hacker and discussed for a week, as I imagine it would be for Arch.

We have a lingering sustainability issue; Parabola desperately needs to go mainstream and I don't know how we can make that happen.
So when the Parabola site goes down, even non-essential parts for a day or two, I worry, because it puts our goal even further out of reach.