would imagine that would be scriptable - the script could be included in the awesome list repo, and run periodically.

The next version of the list will be based on https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted-data (raw YAML data), so much easier to integrate with scripts. There is already a CI system running at https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted-data/actions, and a preview of an enriched export at https://nodiscc.github.io/awesome-selfhosted-html-preview/ that take stars/last update dates and other metadata into account. This will all go live “soon”.

Perhaps you could consider forks, stars, and followers as “votes” and sort each sub category based on the votes.
it’s easier for readers of the list to quickly find the “most used” options.

This would exclude (or move to the bottom of the list) all projects that are not hosted on these (mostly proprietary) platforms. Right now only metadata from Github is being parsed, in the future it will expand to Gitlab, maybe Gitea instances or similar, but it will take time and not all platforms have these stars/followers/forks features. This would also induce a huge bias as Github projects will have a lot more forks/followers/… than projects hosted on independent forges. Star counts can also (and absolutely are) manipulated by some projects that want to get “trending”.

Also popularity != quality. A project whose code is hosted on cgit can be as good or even better than a project on Github (even more in the context of self-hosting…).

Just an idea off the top of my head. You may have already thought about it, and/or it may be full of holes.

It was a good idea :) But as you can see, it has its flaws.