Dan tends to work on too many things simultaneously (which isn't bad per say, and he thrives doing so) which means things get stalled and its a little hectic. Hoping more funds and community excitement will help spread the work out more and allow him to keep working as he does without other projects being on pause in the meantime.
A few of those projects just need to mature and have teams working on them, I think. There's nothing wrong with him bouncing around to different projects but it sucks that no one's working on Pixelfed if he isn't. It'd be great if he could secure enough funding for an additional paid dev on each of his major projects.
Yeah, it's crazy. Same thing for Loops, FediDB, Sup, and his million other projects. He's a one man band right now. And he has a full-time job on top of that!
I don't think that can go on for much longer with Pixelfed blowing up -- and they're still onboarding about 1000 people per hour. Just for moderating pixelfed.social, he said yesterday that he's received more reports in the last 48 hours than in the last 7 years. There's only so many hours in a day.
This is not that uncommon in open source, but I'd think that something like this community project would be more decentralized, i.e. as a lot of people (especially technical people) use it, and see rough edges, that their motivation would be higher to contribute then.