I’ve seen some projects on GitHub (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?
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.