I like FOSS (free and open source software). Have contributed bug reports and feature suggestions to open source projects that got accepted (e.g. the ability to block instances on lemmy). Check out my github if you’re into that kind of stuff.
Also seems to be growing organically unlike the rest of mastodon . codeberg is also democratic and grows organically as indicated by donations.
There is some evidence this model could be beneficial. there is some research about the benefits of credit unions and housing cooperative which is also indirect evidence iirc.
I run BT Free public charity https://btfree.org/
I suggest putting it on your about page. i personally try to limit my time trying to contribute to FOSS. seeing that someone is a actual contributor helps prioritize how to try to help. i assume other people have a similar approach.
maybe Mastodon has the most users (idk)
can they get them out to vote?
My assumption is that if someone is willing to pay and support FOSS he is going to be more thoughtful. There is a risk that just newer platform might not be well known yet so they will get less votes despite being superior. maybe have people give a score on a scale of 1-100 like the ACSI and if a platforms say have one percent of the votes and has the highest average it is selected. if this will gather interest and will go on for a few years different approaches could be tried. and you could do polls asking the community what to do . you could set up some kind of paywalled community, i think discord and patreon has that feature but maybe there is a open source alternative (mitra?).
Nice job growing your instance BTW.
Similarweb reports a estimate of the total visits in a month. lemmy.world report says “520,592” total visits which is a lot (more then a website in my country i visit relatively frequently).
That of course does not indicate the quality of the interactions which is obviously important ( i still spend time on reddit, but the quality of interaction in youtube for example is better then reddit and even lemmy for me because it has actual experts in it TBH).
One way it is measured is by customer satisfaction, where for example for social media bluesky currently gets the highest score at least as measured by the ACSI. with pinterest and youtube in the second place. but the scores aren’t that high (bluesky is at 82/100).
Other then that there are various awards, like the oscars or the emmy. Maybe we need a fediverse platform of the year award and fediverse instance of the year award. People could have to donate some money to vote so there won’t be a risk of too many bots gaming it and the money could be used to fund the instance/platform or fund the marketing of it. but i don’t know if enough people are interested in that.
A few points:
MAU is a problematic indicator for the fediverse. for example misskey does not report it properly (see the github), for some open source platforms like lemmy the definition of active users is too strict IMO (i would count anyone that logged in, but that is a different discussion).
if you look at the growth rate of servers it is pretty good i would argue. i calculated a around 30 percent annual growth in the last few years. if this was a stock or a ETF or a pension fund this would be considered a very good growth rate IMO.
generalizing about the fediverse is not very useful IMO. look at specific software. when i thought of things i thought could be good for lemmy i submitted issues and things got implemented. if i can do it a lot of other people can. feedback is important.
you are asking people who are already satisfied with the fediverse platform they are using. which could be useful but i think you should be asking people who are not using it. find accounts you like that make you or others stay on proprietary platforms. that you think provide high quality content and ask them what they want. or even have a discussion about what features to design or experiment with. for example i saw people on r/newiran (subreddit for the opposition in iran) wanting a feature to show from which country someone posts in (like what twitter recently added). this can even just be a unofficial plugin people can install. these kind of things could provide a competitive advantage that will help people use the fediverse on top of what they want or need in proprietary platforms.