But it needs to be done, even if nobody wants to do it.

Nobody wants to do it for free. Show some actual support to the developers, let's help them find a way to let work on something without worrying about how they will keep a roof over their heads, and I can bet that things will start being prioritized accordingly.

If you want any open source project to be more than "a student project thrown together", then we need to treat the people working on it as professionals. And how well are these professionals being treated by this "community", if is not able to collectively pay for one FT developer and where the "CTO" of Mastodon GmbH makes less than what an intern can get at Facebook?

And since I'm feeling like a rant is brewing inside me, allow me to vent a little: when I mean "developers", it doesn't need to be the Lemmy team exactly. As I said in the top comment, my fediverser project already added an "admin" backend that could be used by staff and moderation. it wouldn't be difficult at all to turn it into a center dashboard for moderation, and it could even be made to have a granular permission system. From the reasonable amount of people that expressed interest, how many do you think actually opened up their wallets to help? Zero

Back in July when Reddit revealed its true colors, I thought people finally understood the importance of paying for the products they use, so I took the opportunity to pledge 20% of Communick's profits to the Fediverse projects that I offer. I thought it would be a win-win-win situation: I could acquire customers, users would have expert help to figure out their issues and hopefully even help steering the direction of the project, and developers would have some form of income while not having to deal with a barrage of requests from the non-technical mob. How well do you think that went? Let me tell you: The handful of paying customers that I have are amazing, but they are simply not enough for me to even the server bills.

It frustrates me to no end when I think of how "anti-capitalistic" people here claim to be, yet I can bet that if we got only the the North American users who have bought an iPhone to pay $1/month, we would probably be able to fund all of the leading fediverse projects and kill Big Tech.

There, rant over.