Freezing the public version while continuing to work on it in private but not allowing anyone to see what you're working on... doesn't seem to me less likely to

Freezing the public version while continuing to work on it in private but not allowing anyone to see what you're working on... doesn't seem to me less likely to create a fork... Either people are going to stop paying attention to it entirely (is that a desired outcome?), or they're going to mess with what's public, right?