> That's not entirely true: my work might get zero traction because nobody will know about it.

Being able to market your work and build community are key skills for open source contribution. The history of forges is littered with interesting code that never got enough attention to go anywhere.

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eviks 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The history is also littered with dead open source rejecting useful improvements, so your criterion doesn't help either

	▲	anticorporate 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Then, as the parent commenter suggested, fork the dead project. No project is obliged to accept your contributions. It's on you to market them, either to the maintainers of the existing project for merging, or to the community through a fork.

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ragall an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Being able to market your work and build community are key skills for open source contribution.

It's not a key skill at all, as not everyone is interested in popularity.