I often observe that people that started a small open source project seem to abandon it sooner or later. I’m guilty of this myself in numerous cases. Reasons there are many probably, from new obligations in life to shifts in interest and whatnot.
At some point somebody comes by with an issue, or a merge request even, but the maintainer does not take care of it. Usually this ends up in forks, often though forks undergo the same fate. Apart from the immediate forks-jungle, stuff like software stores or other things might be hardlinked to the original repo, which means places like these end up with dead originals and a number of forks with varying degree of being maintained as well.
To me its just a sad situation overall. And yet I cannot find the time or motivation to maintain some stuff, because circumstances just changed. And I also do not think one is obliged to do so, just because they where nice enough to share their code when the project mattered to them.
Is there a better way? Usually these are very nieche projects, and there is not a circle of regularly active developers that could share administration of a repo, but rather a quiet one-man-show with a short timespan of incredible activity. Some kind of sensible failover mechanism once the original maintainer vanishes would probably be cool. Or any other way that introduces some redundancy in keeping a repository alive. You know how package maintainers in Linux distributions open their package(s) for adoption by somebody else if they run out of capacity? I think that is nice.
I will publish a small project soon I think, but somewhere in the future I fear to leave one or the other person frustrated again when I have moved on to other things…
I don’t think that’s really any kind of flaw. Not every project needs to be actively maintained.
It’s OK to write something as a one-off because it’s useful to you. It’s OK to share that to other people with a license that allows them to use it for their own purposes without making a commitment to work on it forever. It’s OK if it’s never particularly useful to a general audience and only serves as a small convenience for other people who can follow the code and adapt it to their own purposes or make modifications for compatibility.
If 1% of products that are shared unmaintained save 1 other person some work and 0.001% serve as a jumping off point for someone down the line into a project that forms a community around it, that’s still a net positive, isn’t it? I’d try not to make promises I’ll actively maintain it if I won’t, and be descriptive enough to make it easy to find your project if you’re chasing the same problem and easy to read/adapt the code, but making it available, in and of itself, is a service.