I can feel the author's anxiery. I've created and maintained an open source project for almost 4 years and it's still not the most popular in its category thoug

I can feel the author's anxiery. I've created and maintained an open source project for almost 4 years and it's still not the most popular in its category though it's doing well and growing slowly and steadily. I have at times thought that I must have done something wrong but those people who do use my project keep reminding me how useful it is for them. I think it's easy as a project author to start blaming yourself for not making your project more popular but you have to keep in mind that project quality doesn't have that much to do with popularity. Some projects are just niche and you have to focus on making a small number of users very happy instead of making a large number of users a little bit happy. Maybe your project could reach more people and the world would actually be a better place because of it but to convince people at such scales, it really takes a lot of marketing, connections and luck - This is beyond what you can do as a single open source developer. I think that open source projects these days cannot get past a certain threshold of success until they raise funding and start seriously commercializing.