I believe that the Fediverse can and should be more than a niche thing for those that reject Big Tech.
I also believe that to get there we will need businesses, service providers and professional developers who work on it because they are motivated by more than just “community values” and goodwill. For example, I have quite a bit experience with distributed systems and I know I could work to make Lemmy federation more efficient, but I can only do that if I can secure a stable income.
Please follow the linked Mastodon thread and vote on the polls. The idea is to find out if there are enough people willing to pay for services that can ease their pains with Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix.
Another compelling proposal from an admin/dev of blahaj.zone: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9ev0kge0aj
From what I understand, as they run their own platfrom software that’s a small fork of Calckey, and which has search built in, their aim is to implement their proposal on their own instance and hope that it spreads (where spreading to other clackey servers, which encompass around ~10k monthly active users at the moment, would likely happen quickly)