I think it comes down to "Is the juice worth the squeeze"
As someone who worked for a large organization maintaining an OSS project, one issue I faced was how do you show impact? We used to have many organizations really love and use our project , but they would hardly give anything back to the project, including writing blogs where they could have shared some success stories. IMO github stars/pip downloads etc are not good metrics and these are even worser metrics in today's agentic AI world. Its so easy to fake these nowdays.
Github stars are such a terrible metric, completely gameable. The facy it is taken seriously appalls me.
>Its so easy to fake these nowdays.
What do you mean? Do you mean that automated agents will needlessly download your code for no reason to bump up your numbers? Or do you mean that you can't compare your own project to other ones because they might be faked?
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- https://boost-like.store/category/github-services/github-sta...
- https://www.socialplug.io/services/buy-github-stars
- https://buy.fans/buy-github-stars/
- https://www.followdeh.com/order/add?ss=8150
- https://vurike.com/product/buy-github-stars/
You don't need to use agents to download, pull or fork code believe it or not
Why did you need to show impact? Was it for internal budgeting?
(no impact == no staffing, no resource allocation) -> Leadership: "please, stop working on it"
People can't go into OSS projects expecting anyone will care as much as they do. In general, only a few applications become popular enough to remain in active self-sustaining maintenance a decade later.
The real question, is if a project is "worth it" for your own fun. =3