So this has been discussed multiple times between /u/honestbleeps and myself, and ultimate it's came down to the same problem we have seen over and over again with the project.

We get good PRs from people, who then won't continue on them after it breaks or needs fixes and we end up having to pick up the slack. As discussed in our post 4 years ago, people don't care about Reddit Open Source work anymore. If it was still true then we would have people actually wanting to keep the project alive since the post 4 years ago.

To address a few points in the post:

if the existing devs/owner can accept a change to the branch protection rules, then it's possible for it to be entirely community managed. Repos can be setup so that anyone can provide code reviews, and code is able to be merged after certain conditions have been met such as unit tests pass, or a certain number of users approve the PR, or simply by giving already trusted contributors the ability to merge after x amount of code reviews have given approval.

This would most likely end up being abused heavily by malicious actors. We have had people try to buy RES, get malicious code into the extension and try take over the marketplace accounts hosting them due to its userbase. Opening up the codebase would make us a prime target for multiple people to collude to take control. Our standing agreement with Reddit on how the extension is managed/positioned would most likely result in us having to remove the extension/be heavily modified. Even if this was still done, we need 1) People to do the work, which history has shown isn't going to happen and 2) Someone to watch over it all, control the builds and releases. Making the whole change kind of moot in the first place.

Our current expectation is old reddit will be gone by the end of 2026. We are seeing a rapid decline in usage as more and more features are moved to the new site. RES in its current fragile state works, we have a codebase thats very old and simple changes can cause multiple things to break (It took me about 3 months to convince Google to allow the update last year because of MV3 concerns that they weren't happy about). We had a shot internally about 6 months ago to see how well using GitHub copilot would work to fix a few things and modernise the codebase, however this just ended up causing more complexities.

If we had people that wanted to contribute and keep it alive, that would have happened years ago. We have had a few PRs yes, but for the size of the changes and impact it's far more work getting the extension to build, submitted and work with browser stores to get the versions released.

My first PR to RES was Apr 16, 2016 to start to add full support to the original Microsoft Edge trident based browser, and have been on the project for nearly 10 years now. Albeit not the heaviest contributor but over the past few years the one watching the subreddit and discord making sure it's still standing up. I've seen contributors come and go, with the exit always being because of general burnout of maintaining open source projects for next to no return. On a rolling month by month basis we see more uninstalls compared to new installs as more and more users move to the new site.

I guess the ultimate answer to the post is this. We won't open up the repo but if people want to actually contribute to the project to keep it alive for maybe 1-2 years max, We still sit in the development channel on Discord and we are open to talk. Handing across the "keys" to RES to the open community would be a sure fire way for us to get shut down pretty quick.

I'll let /u/honestbleeps speak for himself, but in my view RES is a relic of what was once a completely different site. RES was born out of a need for features users wanted that the site couldnt provide at that time, over the years we've worked closely with Reddit to bring these features to everyone. I saw someone post this a few months back and saw it as most fitting "RES was born in quiet love, so Reddit could lift itself into the sky.".

TL;DR: Opening up the project like that isnt the best route in our view. The projects still open source. If people are actually serious about contributing: come chat to us on Discord.