@mattly yeeeeeah unfortunately I think the bottleneck for mastodon itself isn't necessarily labor so much as will to improve
from what I hear I feel like if you were going to try to contribute improvements, you'd get a much bigger payoff/effort improving gotosocial even with its dramatically smaller userbase; otherwise you'd just spend all your time convincing maintainers that things need to improve
maybe glitch-soc or hometown would be better? but again, dramatically smaller userbase