Github can help with this situation a lot. Yes, people are free to write and abandon whatever they want, but once a library has had hundreds of dependent users, and the primary repo is abandoned / unmaintained, Github could do a lot to guide dependent users away to a better fork.

Today though, every popular repo has hundreds of forks and there is no easy way to identify forks that are more actively maintained. I understand it is a non-trivial problem, but hopefully Github has the talent to solve this problem.

At the very least they can make it easy to ignore forks where

1. changes have already been merged upline 2. forks that only have cosmetic changes of imports (happens a lot for Go repositories)

This will allow the developer to pass the torch, so to speak, to someone else willing to maintain their own fork.