Thanks for the feedback! The reasoning for the banners thing was that the best communities should have one set, and there are a lot of communities, and the display looks better with them 😁

There was another comment on this, so I'm just deploying a change that will have it default to not hide them.

I could also definitely improve the layout for communities without a banner and instead show some additional details about them (longer description, languages, etc)

Regarding uptime, I don't really want to have to monitor every instance, but as I'm looking to build a "Join an instance" page I will want to have this data, I may look to use a similar method to this one which uses https://api.fediverse.observer/