Theoretically yes, in practice a project gains reputation and it’s managers gain skills and experience, so i fork isn’t always migrated to easily and it might be harder to keep it going, look at reddit , having the source code didn’t really help and despite lemmy being in development for years the reddit ecosystem (RES in particular) still has advantages that are important at least to me.
tbh IMO i Don’t think you could persuade them to do that, the whole make decentralized social media more decentralized is not something that will have significant value to them, would be better to have some volunteer led non profit with a governance model that has a decentralized power structure as the “default” option.
They’ve been completely dropping the ball for years. I used to donate regularly but have completely given up on this project. It’s a farce at this point.
Liberapay shows the number of donors has almost doubled in the last few months (look at “view income history”), so i hope it is an indication that they made good changes to the project management and the future will be better.
Maybe we can add individual pages to awesome-lemmy listing individual features that are interesting.
Another option is slant.co that enables listing pros and cons of software and voting on them and the software itself, I added a question here so feel free to add options , the website is closed source but currently i am not aware of a better open source option (maybe we can ask libRate to add this functionality).
It still has advantages, you don’t have to depend on some server and trust it will keep your data, you can build features on top of a certain front end and don’t have to re-implement functionality and maybe even support multiple front ends.