Why do some people fork repos but make no changes to them?

https://lemmy.world/post/38012397

Why do some people fork repos but make no changes to them? - Lemmy.World

I’ve seen some projects on GitHub (howdy [https://github.com/boltgolt/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?

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.