Problem

Some Github projects suffer from being abandoned by their maintainers for many different and completely understandable reasons. This can even happen to quite popular projects as there is often no clear mechanism for someone else taking over without the current maintainer actively engaging.

This can be very frustrating for the users of the projects and those who submit issues & pull requests. Forking is of course an option but what stops that fork dying and how to do you figure out which fork to use?