This might also be a great way for the original creator to identify that people still find their software useful. It might help in handing off the project to an active community.
yeah, that's an explicit goal: to surface the implicit/nascent open source communities that are already coalescing around projects.
if a bunch of people all agree that it's worthwhile to keep a particular project alive, and they're doing the work to make it happen, then they have something in common, and it should be easy for them to meet each other.
if a bunch of people all agree that it's worthwhile to keep a particular project alive, and they're doing the work to make it happen, then they have something in common, and it should be easy for them to meet each other.