Exactly. I have a reasonably popular github project (Haraka, an SMTP server) and frankly the stars mean nothing. What really means something for an open source

Exactly. I have a reasonably popular github project (Haraka, an SMTP server) and frankly the stars mean nothing. What really means something for an open source project is two things: - for ego only: the large scale users (eg one user I spoke to a couple of weeks ago is receiving over 200 million emails a day with it, with a single server doing over 150k concurrent connections - that's why I built Haraka and it's a good feeling knowing it can do that) - for contributions: I don't want to be the sole developer - I have other stuff to do. Getting contributions from the community is a far better metric than stars. But more stars do tend to equal more contributions.