Before you incorporate someone's Github library into your own project, you want to know some things. Is it secure? Is it well-maintained? Is there an active userbase to help with support? Stars are one indicator of this.
I think people mainly use stars as bookmark.
In OctoSQL[0] I'm literally just sending JSON files with coarse information about 1. invocations of the CLI, 2. features used in these invocations, to a VM on DigitalOcean (with a 10-line server receiving them and writing to a JSON file - which I can then process using OctoSQL itself).
Thanks to this I knew that until recently most of what I had were stars, not actual usage, and could also see how the big rewrite I released in January (and the following updates) made a lot of people start actually using it since. Very nice feeling :)
All telemetry logic in OctoSQL is actually contained in a single short file[1].
PS: Keep in mind that https requests take a long time, as they need to do a few roundtrips for the TLS handshake. Don't do that on every invocation if you have latency-sensitive invocations. I.e. in OctoSQL I'm only sending aggregated telemetry data every 10 invocations (as well as on the very first one).
[0]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql
[1]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql/blob/main/telemetry/tele...
Also agree with you about telemetry. We send some minimal telemetry in Robusta (also easily disabled) and it's been a big help for us as a project.
First time I posted an early naive version of my string lib, the thread became a deluge of 500+ reactions and constructive advice. Subsequent submissions with a much better work got me depressed.
But projects I work with daily, I don't need to star them to remember they exits, like React or Webpack.
Anyone know of any other solutions around this sort of thing?
I use a self-hosted Plausible analytics server to implement this[0] across all my websites, so it's all public and you get to see exactly what I see[1][2].
[0] https://hexops.com/privacy/
Edit: the code in question[2].
[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/activity/starring#custom-med...
[2]: https://github.com/bytebase/star-history/blob/c8c66678db8015...
Just to share a trick, you can also use markdown to embed a live star history chart to your GitHub README. e.g.
## Star History
[![Star History Chart](https://api.star-history.com/svg?repos=bytebase/star-history...
Instruction: https://star-history.com/#bytebase/star-history&Date
Enjoy~
Is there a way to move or remove the legend. It's coming on the top of the curve for my project [1]. I am guessing there would be more projects with such a profile.
[1] https://github.com/amzn/computer-vision-basics-in-microsoft-...
<shameless-plug> We also show the GitHub star history, alongside npm download history, issue and PR stats on Openbase: https://openbase.com/js/react/insights </shameless-plug>
Does not work. Only JavaScript top list work for me.
Some feedback though, I found it really hard to understand what the cost would be for "Trying my own dataset" (After the first year) and how TiBD factors in and would be used. All obvious links for TiBD go direct to a signup page which I don't want to fill without some understanding/validation of the service I'm signing up for. Removing the path of this signup page, in an attempt to go to the root URL to learn more, then takes me to an Auth0 access page. I appreciate I may not be your target market, but just giving my view of someone thinking "This looks cool, how much would it cost to have a customized version of this?"
[0] https://github.com/bytebase/star-history/tree/main/packages/...
To play devil's advocate to those who thumb their noses at GH stars, I've found this metric to be a helpful proxy in my career when choosing libraries.
https://github.com/dtolnay/star-history
Here is a side-by-side comparison of graphs generated by star-history.com vs my tool: https://github.com/dtolnay/star-history/issues/8
You can distinguish a lot finer structure in my graph: coinciding with individual blog posts with not as much reach as something on Hacker News front page. That structure is almost entirely concealed in star-history.com by the cartoony graphs.
It was on the HN homepage for about 5 hours yesterday, never higher than about 25. The initial jump on the 25th was some attention on Twitter. Also the HN link was to the website, not the GitHub. I imagine if it had been a link to the repository the stars would be higher.
The idea being that people who starred your repo who themselves have tons of stars are likely "better" in that they are likely to be experienced, intelligent users, and not bots.
