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Number of stars also excludes self hosted forges. Stars is more of a GitHub-wants-to-be-a-social thing than actual measure of popularity.

• cmrdporcupine 8mo ago
  Yeah, I was going to come here to say this. Apart from a) stars are a dubious metric b) 5000 stars is an insanely high bar, there is the issue that there are definitely lots of projects that choose not to partake in GitHub at this point. That said, they do have a "contact us" line in there which implies some flexibility.
  • ryandrake 8mo ago
    You can easily buy stars in bulk, like you can buy social media “likes” so they are kind of measuring the wrong thing and incentivizing the wrong behaviors.
  • jefftk 8mo ago
    It also strongly favors older projects, since stars don't expire and they've had longer to accumulate them.