How to continue to develop an open source project if the maintainer has abandoned this project?

Question

GitHub

The point is this. There is a project (open source MIT), the maintainer of this project has not appeared in it for a long time, pull requests do not accept any, but the project is good, and there is a desire to dig into it, modify it to fit your needs. How to be?

Answer 1

1) Write to the author of the project by mail whether he is ready to add you to the developers (collaborators) of the project so that you continue his work, sometimes they don’t even mind
2) If there is no answer/against - do a fork, merge the pull requests yourself into your fork ( and notify the pull request authors about this, they may be interested)
In the second case, you may want to separate from the main project and become an independent project - you can write about this in GitHub support, they will make sure that your project will not be displayed as a fork of another project, but as a standalone project.
If there are any unresolved issues in the original project that you are fixing for yourself - write in the appropriate issue, people will be happy to switch to a fork where these problems do not exist, so you will immediately have a certain number of very loyal users.
PS I have a similar experience :)