On the fork, I fear I slightly miscommunicated. I was not talking about a deep fork with major feature deltas. Keeping forks up to date is much easier these days as github added a button into the web ui. Most modern PRs come from forks already in github, as that is the common workflow, fork from lemmy to a personal fork under my github username, make changes, generate PR.
What I was proposing, is a workflow that was instead of:
The goal would be three fold, first as mentioned, to gain trust in a source of PRs over time as we would act as gate-keepers. Second to be able to batch accessibility related work so that the Lemmy devs can worry about less PRs. Third, we could test on this site a bit in production use to see how it works before we ship it back to Lemmy proper.
Additionally, I hope neither full time developers nor rust developers would be required as it is mostly going to be html accessibility stuff (typescript, css, html, etc).
Right now, the experience on Lemmy is a fairly huge step down from Reddit for me, so trying to think aloud about best ways to improve it, maybe just direct contribution to Lemmy is best.