My initial motivation for my (small) projects was always to scratch my own itch. Beyond that, it feels really good when someone else uses the code. For my curre

My initial motivation for my (small) projects was always to scratch my own itch. Beyond that, it feels really good when someone else uses the code. For my current side-project, I keep up maintenance because it's interesting work and because I can plausibly benefit from bug fixes. It's neat to see how other people adapt the code and open up new use-cases. For that reason, I love high-quality bug reports and treat them with some urgency. For projects I lose interest in, I unsubscribe from everything and either mark the project as maintenance mode or try to find a maintainer. To find maintainers, I've had good success granting write access to anyone who lands a few good PRs and telling them they have free reign over the code.