A community voting system
Background
With the augmentation of Pleroma "casual" users (not power users, not admins), the ratio of people being involved in the development to Pleroma users is slowly but steadily decreasing, which is pretty normal. However, we do not have an efficient way to gather demands and other suggestions from the wider community, outside of Gitlab issues and IRC rants.
Suggestion
My suggestion is to implement a model (loosely) based on the Swiss voting system:
Four dates per year during which the user base is asked to vote on features that are not part of the roadmap. This would enable us to receive feedback on those from people who use Pleroma while not being actively involved in its development (which is bound to become the majority of the users).
Discussion
I would like to discuss some adjacent points regarding this suggestion, especially the means we have to advertise and regulate a vote
Indeed, the Pleroma user base seems more fragmented than the Mastodon one. In the Mastodon community, the #MastoAdmin hashtag exists to discuss adminstration-related topics with their fellow admins.
I do not know of such a thing amongst Pleroma administrators, since many of them
use IRC to speak of such things.
My point here is that we should start creating privileged information feeds for
Pleroma administrators and users who care about their instance.
Please let me know if I forgot something.
Cheers!