This is the way. For projects that turn out to be surprisingly popular or useful - it's nice if the canonical author have time to merge patches with bug fixes

This is the way. For projects that turn out to be surprisingly popular or useful - it's nice if the canonical author have time to merge patches with bug fixes - but often I think a simple update to the readme along the lines of "fork X is maintained" is just fine (assuming someone in the community maintain fork X for their own use).