It also needs more reliability and a better funding model. I had complex ideas for collateral funding I thought about for fun, but a simple bounty system for goals might be effective.

I'm not really sure what's going on with Lemmy development. If I was writing contributions for it, I would probably focus on making federation perfect between services first, because I think that's very important to users. Though, I'm not, and haven't submitted any pull requests. I did write stuff to pull all comments and posts from instances though as a start towards that goal, but that was more so for fun.

edit: As an example, I would absolutely donate $1 if you found 1000 other people to also donate $1 for a specific development goal. Lemmy.world has 6,000 people every day, I think it's possible to raise some money for specific development goals.