This topic still deserves genuine and transparent research.

Agreed. I'll try asking our UX people and see what they'd expect/want.

(federation and open-source) are too splintered

I think that's a feature, not a bug, at least in the abstract sense.

For example, I think federation is a terrible solution to the general problem we're trying to solve here. It requires too much hosting costs for everyone to self-host, requires too much trust in the admin to properly horizontally scale, and is inherently complex, which scares people away (and some of that complexity seeps through to the user).

However, a lot of people think it's the bees knees, hence why we have Mastodon and Lemmy. I still think it's poorly designed for scale, so my projects aren't federated, but I certainly appreciate the people working on it in the meantime (I see it as a stopgap), and I do contribute fixes here and there (I was somewhat active in fixing bugs when I came to Lemmy).

We really need a way to get a community-pulse

This is tricky because there is no one community. It's better managed as separate communities instead of one large FOSS community.

So maybe projects just need a better way to gather feedback from users other than issue trackers. Projects really should do more polls.