Fork repo, make local changes intending to push to fork for PR, never push anything. Very common.
Also, SO MANY SITES have the button that says "Fork me on GitHub!" that is often wonder if people think it's something that it isn't.
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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"Mmm this looks neat"
Puts in pocket for later
This is exactly what I do... and then never touch it again.
I'm getting to it! It's on my to do list, with the 13,572 other projects I'm working on :(
I have big plans for those repos and I am definitely going to get around to it 🥹
Same, I'll get to them soon
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.
I do this. I have an instance of gitea running internally that mirrors any repo I have on github. Super nice for archiving things of importance or even as a bookmark. Sometimes I do it because of fear of censorship like dcma and stuff for software I use.
Fork it so i have my version, regardless if the original goes away. (Assuming Github doesn't nuke all repos of course like they did with youtube-dl for a while)
GitHub nukes forks when the original repository is deleted. The correct way to handle your use case is by creating pull mirrors, ideally on a different host.
I didn't know this, and I'm sure a lot other people don't know this and that's why they fork - to have their own copy of the repo, thinking they have full control over it.
I have forked projects in the past and IIRC i had to send a request to be disassociated from the original repo, otherwise all pull requests default to the original repo which is annoying.
You can simply git clone on your system and push it to whatever other remote you want. It should not be associated to the origin in that way.
In my personal workflow, I fork GitHub and Codeberg repos so that my local machine's "origin" points to my fork, not to the main project. And then I also create an "upstream" remote to point to the main project. I do this as a precursor before even looking at a code on my local machine, as a matter of course.
Why? Because if I do decide to draft a change in future, I want my workflow to be as smooth as possible. And since the norm is to push to one's own fork and then create a PR from there to the upstream, it makes sense to set my "origin" to my fork; most established repos won't allow pushing to a new topic branch.
If I decide that there's no commit to do, then I'll still leave the fork around, because it's basically zero-cost.
TL;DR: I fork in preparation of an efficient workflow.
I have done this just to preserve a thing in its current state because it looked like the main developer was gonna do something stupid and/or fuck it up.
I have a bunch if Steam games I have never played..
Maybe they planned to make some changes, but never got around to them or at least didn't get them to work the way they intended.
Confirmed. Guilty as charged.
When looking for activity, are you only checking for the number of commits ahead/behind, or are you also checking for new branches?
A common workflow is to fork a project, clone it locally, add some work on a new branch, push it to your fork, and then create a pull request from the new branch. None of that will add commits to the default branch.
Heh, guilty. Pretty much always something where I had an ambition to make a change but got distracted or didn't have time to work on it.
We want to make changes but can't find time.
Maybe some people don't delete the fork after their PR is done.
In my case, I found another explanation.
Sometimes, a random person comes and forks one of my repos. I check their profile, and it's a techbro student with hundreds of forked repos without any commits. With their bio referencing AI or some shit.
I'm pretty sure these people fork a lot of repos just to pad their CV or something. Make it look like you have a lot of repos. Because when you go to someone's profile, it is not clear that a repo is a fork instead of their own creation.
When you visit someone's profile on github it defaults to source. It won't show forks at all for a 'normal' visitor to a profile. You have to explicitly clear the filter to see forks.
Maybe they changed the defaults. I stopped using GitHub after they trained their AI over private repos.
But I remember clearly that I was annoyed when looking at my own repos because my forks (for actually doing PRs) would show at the top instead of my own repos.
It’s been that way for many years, I’d say at least 4 or 5? Long before all this ai nonsense.
yeah, makes sense. The cynical part of my mind also led me to your 2nd explanation. :)
Maybe I was trying to click the watch button and missed.
I wanted to learn github.
Sometimes I fork to make changes locally, but they're either me-specific or hacky garbage I don't want to publish. Because of that, I normally don't commit those changes, and definitely don't push to GitHub or make a PR.
This reminds me of a legacy Rails 3.2 app that used a fork of the official Ruby on Rails only for one commit that backported some one-liner bug fix. This was at an old job in the Rails 6 days, getting it on the latest official version was definitely an adventure (no unit tests + tons of spaghetti code + a dash of currency conversions stored as Postgres floats).
Following instructions to use GitHub as a blog host. Step one: fork some repo so that I've got a copy on my profile.
What do you think that people should be doing instead? What is your own workflow when contributing to projects on GitHub?
I'd do a PR. Although I would understand forking if the project maintainers wouldn't merge a PR. (or create an issue (for the fix/ addition) if the README says that it's an option)
So while you're working on your PR, where do you push your commits? If you don't fork, you can't push them to Github. You don't have access to the repo you're making a PR for. That's exactly why people fork.
Of course you could just NOT push any commits, but then your commits only exist locally on your development machine, and if you have a hardware failure you've lost them, defeating the point of a distributed version control system. Or you could push them to another computer you have access to, but Github lets you push to your own free account for free, so most people would rather just do that. Which they do. By creating a fork.
Maybe it's okay if you're only creating a small PR with a single commit or two. But for more extensive development, anyone reasonable is going to create a fork so they have somewhere to store their work until it's ready. Once/If the PR is merged, the fork is abandoned as it's no longer needed. But that's why they exist.
A PR requires push access... That's why you create a fork... So you can create a PR from your fork.