I’ve seen some projects on GitHub (howdy being one of them that came to mind) where there are forks, but when I check the forks out they are either unchanged, or are behind by a few commits. I was wondering why this would happen. It couldn’t be for archival purposes, could it?
One reason I can think off the top of my head is archiving: Nothing prevents the owner of a repo from simply deleting it.
While true and some will do it for that reason, I bet most do it simply because the friction to forking is so low.
Some might have an intention to work on it but then don’t or might start looking at it in detail then give up or get to busy or lose interest.
Others might just click it to save it for later.
And don’t forget all the people that click it by accident.
It’s not like it is a big investment to click the button.