If you can program you can probably create an instance and then a moderation bot that bans people with more then X comments or Y posts a day. maybe that would increase the average quality of content. sounds like an interesting experiment.
It is lower from where it was in june (48.472) and the data seem to indicate a negative trajectory , also lemmy donations seem to be the lowest i remember them to be.
So i would not get too confident, the project IMO needs to focus on highly requested killer features. My impression they focusing too much on technical issues that don’t seem to be really important in a way that reminds me of the infamous The CADT Model rant of Jamie Zawinski. Do we really need to do a UI rewrite?
I think you want to use AGPL. people can still make a closed source website out of your project due to the ASP loophole.