Only a very small fraction of the 27000 new members are capable of developing the platform, and many (like me) don't donate directly. However, members might be more willing to donate AI or other IT resources in an 'indirect' way.
There are 27000 members with access to an AI, that can code (more or less). There are also developer agent architectures like 'smol-ai', and 'gpt engineer' etc, that works directly on a code base, that could assist with the development. (https://github.com/smol-ai/developer and https://github.com/AntonOsika/gpt-engineer)
An AI could run through the git requests and create a list of 'easy' non blocking features to develop/fix, and the members developer architecture could take on one of these issues and do a pull request. Another way is for Lemmy to host such an architecture, and let members donate 'AI prompts', or even API keys (when accounting is possible) for common development.
The tooling/workflow integration isn't quite there yet to be helpful now, and the chance of Lemmy devs getting time for this right now is null.
But how fast could Lemmy development get with 2-300 member AI's working 24/7 on bugs/features ? I'm not a developer, so I don't know how to set up such an AI assisted development workflow. But it could be done, and development speed of ALL open source projects in general would skyrocket with an open to join 'AI developer architecture'.
Hey, we could even have a global federated FOSS AI developer architecture, and people/smaller AI architectures with cool ideas for open projects could request global FOSS AI developer time for their idea/project. I'm sure someone is already working on something like this.