wiki_me

Active users and number of servers also recently reach all time high.

If you want to learn how to create a good open source project for the fediverse. i think peertube is the best role model for that.

TBH i think you're overthinking it, funding software development and running businesses like open source software development is often driven by self interest (even if it's not easy to accept) . Like in software development part of it is throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. So trying to transition to more closed model is expected (some of the projects you mentioned went back to being open source).

Sure i have my opinions about software licensing but for me open source is good enough. if something like that will happen and the software is good a fork will be made. That is a acceptable risk-reward calculation to me.

I am considering applying for a grant to fund the development, but there may be complications, especially given that I am a Ukrainian citizen currently living in Ukraine. I am not yet sure what specific difficulties might arise.

Maybe contact framasoft, the creators of peertube. maybe they could help or even provide employment .

Therefore, as an alternative, I would consider fundraising directly from interested users and the community to support development. Since you mentioned fundraising, I would like to ask how you feel about having an option to financially support the project’s development

I recommend giving in a shot, while trying to use lemmy approach of having a good fundraising process with a pop up specifically . I actually tried to write a learning resource for funding open source so there is a lot to say about that. but you would still need a relatively large number of active users. Lemmy for example has around 37K monthly active users and earns around 3.6K a month. so around 10 active users per dollar. I looked at other fediverse platforms and i think it is one of the most effective fundraising processes when measured using active users per revenue ratio.

You could also just put ads in it and maybe a option to pay to remove them . openfront does this and still seems relatively popular. FOSS is nice but eating is better.

Would you personally consider becoming a financial contributor? If so, what monthly amount would you potentially be willing to contribute?

I am afraid i am not a very good case study. i am not really a peertube users and already spend a relatively large chunk of my time on FOSS so i don't want to invest in it too much.

Regarding your points about benchmarking the recommendation system and curator-based feeds, I am not entirely sure I understood what you meant. Could you please clarify?

Regarding elo ranking something like a page on the website where you are shown two pages with recommendations from two different recommendation systems and you would vote which page and system provided better recommendations . You could also just have one feed and see which recommendation system has a better viewed video to liked video ratio.

Regarding curation. some account invites a bunch of people to act as curators. then something like the most liked videos this group of people had in the last 24h or week get shown. something like that.

If you are looking for free hosting, maybe checkout tuxfamily.

You could also put some links for donations (liberapay , open collective etc) and fundraise the money for better hosting outside of ukraine (and maybe some could go to ukraine government though taxation ). I saw a patreon but no mention that the donations could be used for better hosting which could motivate people.

If you don't want to deal with taxes, i think using some non profit could help with that (opencollective , Software Freedom Conservancy , spi etc ).

I would like to see some benchmarking of the recommendation system, maybe with a elo ranking like done for AI .

allowing feeds by teams of curators is an idea i would like to have explored (it could be benchmarked using surveys or elo).

This seems really good btw.

Why not link the source code from the website (or did i miss it?)

Which is not useful if those users are people who try out the platform and then abandon it, or worst bots for state actors.

Right now i don't see any movement in the amount of donations (patreon, liberapay). so i am not kinda skeptical this will end up being meaningful growth.

They have a explanation here. they claim part of the problem was banning people who are harmless and not homophobes (they show at least one comment ).

Maybe it is better to avoid duplication of effort and contribute to OSGL.

You just need to add a "mature" tag to it and a option to filter by it. contributing to it is easy as far as i can tell.

The website is already linking to google play store and apple store. right now apps that are purely web don't have a platform to read reviews on . plus neodb lib.reviews are open source although they might not yet be ready for the task yet.

Besides Lemmy mainly gets promoted by word of mouth (eg people recommending it on Reddit)

I doubt that, any data? similarweb shows the top referring site for now is openalternative.co (although at least one of the referring sites mentioned doesn't seem to make sense for me ).

If people want to review Lemmy communities, it would make more sense to make a Lemmy community for that purpose.

I think people would want to see average ratings. reading a community page means you only read 1-3 reviews and that sample size is too small and potentially biased. you could just run into people who hate a instance for some particular reason (and it's not hard for me to think of reasons like that).

Two ideas i like:

linking to a bunch of platforms that have reviews of lemmy, fynd does this:

A neodb instance (but maybe another platform would do) where you can read and write reviews about fediverse instances (but that would require at least one volunteer to moderate it).

It costs real world money to keep that data. tbf i don't think you would find a service that does not delete inactive accounts. iirc when i did a market survey to find a new email address basically all free providers didn't guarantee keeping your data if the account is free and inactive.