A few points:

1. 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).

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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)

Probably

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.

I guess maybe set up a community on lemmy. have the client automatically make posts to it. or comments to a specific post?

Or maybe have a bot clients will send messages to?

Lemmy has a bunch of libraries for automation so that could be used to extract the information you need for the test.

Of course that probably makes it easier to feed fake data (e.g. if china wants to make lemmy.ml more popular).

Pretty sure you want to use the AGPL and not GPL.

The ideal IMO will be some kind of experiment (probably something you should opt in). give people feeds and have them be ranked on a 1-10 scale and see which is better and do a Statistical hypothesis test to make sure the differences are not due to luck.

That is also a product of many variables (including software quality). maybe time to go back to the drawing board.

For this project I’m mainly testing distribution models

What do you expect to learn from those so called tests? (no offence)

The big questions in closed vs open is that there are different scenarios :

for closed source -> less competitor -> more users -> more money -> more investment in the project -> better product.

for open source -> more users want to use it and contribute to it -> better software -> more users -> more potential for making money.

The problem is that for the outcomes you want to track (more money or better software). there are so many variable involved that influence those outcomes so it's hard to deduce that the license is improving the outcomes or making them worst.

It's another case of OSPNS - Open source projects names sucking .

You can register on ibis.wiki, open.ibis.wiki or other instances.

Correction, they are not listed as open to registration on fediverse.observer and they don't have a register button on the front page. unlike fedipedia which is opened.

Also some instances appear to be missing from fediverse observer (i see at least opentextbooksolutions.org not appearing). you could feed it manually which should work (i did it for opentextbooksolutions.org) but a automatic addition will be better. also a lot of the other instances listed on the page you linked appear dead.