This is all “hypothetical” of course. 
If you were the sole maintainer of a project and you have been spending ~90% of your dev time on another totally unrelated project. Should you tell your users via a blog post or do you think would this give users the impression the project was being abandoned?
Looking for opinions on the matter, as I’m stuck in limbo on the topic.
I have a number of OSS projects in various stages of maintenance; some actively being developed, some released but with bugs still being discovered and fixed, some released and stable, some abandoned before reaching that state.
In general, I only label the projects abandoned if I’m not willing to accept/fix bug reports any longer.
That said, I very frequently tell users that I am thankful for their feature request or bug report, but likely won’t have the time to work on it myself. But will gladly accept a pull request of course. Being honest at thus stage is important. The only alternative is burnout.
On some projects, I have offered commit rights to prolific contributers, and this has generally worked out very well.
As a general rule of thumb, if the user is unwilling to contribute effort of their own, I often am likewise unwilling to expend effort on my part. Especially if the issue is unlikely to affect other users.
I have way too many projects to deal with every issue personally. So efforts have to be prioritised. That’s the reality of my situation as an OSS developer.
I suppose it is free software, because you are on this forum. If that’s true then:
Maybe it feels strange for you, but you are not obliged to say anything about it. It is your own project and your own private time. But if you want to say something about it, then be honest.
Users are people too. No matter what you decide to do, they have their own opinions on the matter.
I always appreciate clear and concise communication from a project.
If you have enough users, no matter what you say (or don’t say), people will still find issue with it.
If you’re going to communicate, be clear, be concise, and be honest.
Thanks for the replies everyone. I’m not sure what I’m experiencing. Maybe something like burnout but I strongly feel a desire to work on something different.
I’ve been stuck on the foundations stage of a major new version. I don’t have the motivation that I used to have for the project. I often end up asking myself “is working on this even worth it in the end?” I feel like I will be spending so much time/effort creating something that people will just complain about.
It could just be users attitudes that has changed my own attitude towards the project. More than likely I will try to put a blog post together around my current status/problem.
Just don’t pressure yourself into writing anything elaborate if you don’t actually want to. If you feel you need to get a break or even permanently more distance from the project, just do that. A brief note for courtesy that describes the status (e.g. something like “still taking bugfixes, but no major development”, or even just “not maintained anymore, feel free to contact me or fork if you’re interested in taking over”) is nice and enough.
Knowing is usually better than not knowing, so users will appreciate hearing where its at, even if its not what they were hoping for.
I feel you. I’ve been there.
Realize that you are putting your work out there for free. You are under no obligation whatsoever to please anyone, and you don’t owe anyone anything.
Bug reports, pull requests, issues; they all feel like complaints, criticism. They are not. See them as appreciation: Your software may have had a defect, but it was important enough for someone to write an anonymous message to you over the internet to let you know about it. That’s a user caring enough about your software to try to help you.
I feel that Github’s user interface and community is very poor at communicating non-technical matters. It does not facilitate saying “thank you”, or “I need help”. But you can break that trend: treat your users like people, ask how they’re doing, ask them for help. In my experience, most people turn out to be thankful for your software and your attention.
But above all, don’t burn yourself out. Your mental health is way more important than any side project.
Take a break from all of it. Watch movie, go for a walk. Reinvigorate yourself.