Sometimes you don't even really want your side projects or GitHub repos to become popular. When you're the only user of your app it's fun, you can deploy easil

Sometimes you don't even really want your side projects or GitHub repos to become popular. When you're the only user of your app it's fun, you can deploy easily, maybe prod is also your staging env ... You can afford to screw up your database etc. If you have users you now have to be careful, if your deployment fails the downtime becomes a mental burden, you have to manage backups etc. Maintaining an open source project is also a lot of work. Issues piling on, Pull requests to review, which are not that more fun at home than at work. If you ignore them you start to feel guilty. If you lose interest or have no need for the project anymore you'll feel guilty as well. Anecdotal evidence, my father have made an open ESP*-based webradio. Somehow it got popular (especially in Eastern Europe for some reason). It's fun, people sending you photos of their finished projects etc but then requests for features you don't care for start piling on, you have more bug to fix. He has a donation button and he could monetize more but he's retired and doesn't really care about money, he just wants to have fun making something and the success is a double-edged sword in that regard.