But seriously, I think it’s still an extremely tough sell to get people to pay for social media. I also think this is only meaningfully effective at a pretty large scale, I think the fediverse is better with many small servers. If we do want this sort of larger scale development I don’t think “donate to vote” is particularly appealing to the average user.
I think a more enticing model I think is pay for feature work. An estimate is made for a features difficulty and then users donate (with some sort of fee to go towards server maintenance/upkeep) towards a feature and if the goal is reached the feature is worked on. This is already a popular model for particularly translations of freeware.