I've seen this over and over, I find an interesting Github project to depend on which is inactive e.g. Play-Yeoman then this project having a bunch of forks. I then go fork by fork trying to find whether someone has put some extra effort and value maintaining it, most are simply an "idle" fork that's lagging behind some commits from the main project.
Is there a way to find forks that are actively maintained? or the only way is clicking fork by fork and checking?
Look at the project's Network Graph. This will show you forks which are ahead of it. For example, enragedginger/play-yeoman is three commits ahead.