That's not what they meant at all, don't be obtuse. The community exists around the project (in this case the repo and associated website etc). If you fork it then you have to hope that the community follows you to your fork and that then everyone coalesces around it. This isn't guaranteed to work though, so passing the existing project onto a new maintainer is a much better way of retaining the existing community. That is what was meant when talking about the community.