Lemmy
I open sourced an API IDE this year. Same space as Postman, Insomnia and the rest, but at the same time nothing like them: everything is plain text files in your repo, offline, no account etc.
One of the first things I thought and cared about in the early days was of course downloads and installs. And secondarily, it was stars.
And yeah, some of the competitors (that are also open source) have star counts I envied.
And we didnt do bad, we got 1000 stars relatively easily, with the first launches, rollouts. Developers seem to love what we are doing (the fact that we are not trying to clone Postman and make sth unique instead).
Recently I did the grubby founder thing and opened a competitor's stargazers list (one of the big ones). Partly curiosity, partly hoping to find some users or emails to reach out to. Not proud of it but ok, I was just curious to see who are the users.
Except there were almost no people in there.
Accounts a few months old. Zero repos or one fork. No activity. Multiple usernames like 4145243@ere.com. Public emails that were pure gibberish. Pages and pages of this.
How did this happen? : either they bought stars , or bot farms starred them to make the bots themselves look legit. I
In the beginning I was looking up to the stars but it seems they are as about as real as Instagram followers in 2015.
The only thing my outreach scheme found: the audience I was envying might not exist.
p.s. here is the repo of my tool , in case you wanna have a look.
https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden (yeah we have 1272 stars right now and they are all actual devs 
7 Jul 2026 12:16
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