Why asking stars

[tibastral]

When you go to https://blindnet.dev/, you ask people to star the repo, and you don't give them the opportunity to understand why if they give you a star, then they'll be informed about the next releases (or anything else).

Furthermore, a website doesn't represent the product itself, so I don't understand why it would make any sense to star the repository of a website.

I'm pretty direct about that, but I want to understand.

[nweldev]

Thanks, we always appreciate direct feedbacks 🙂

About Stars

Giving a star to a repository on GitHub doesn't come with any counterpart, unfortunately. It is only a sign of appreciation, which allow the project to have more exposure. It is basically just saying "yeah, I like this and would appreciate seeing it gain popularity" (and, maybe, to add it to a list of stared repository nobody really use 😄). To be informed about the next releases requires you to actually "watch" the repository (watch > custom > releases), which is another separate feature of GitHub.

So, to directly answer your direct question: stars help us to gain a little more exposure, and we believe most 3rd-party developers will understand exactly why. Given your feedback, we might be wrong about the 2nd part of this sentence, so I'd really appreciate it if you could extend your explanation so I can see what could be the best approach here.

About the repository

As we are building an highly modular solution, we extensively discussed if we should maintain it in a mono repository, or even create a "entry-point repository", and finally decided (1) keeping different technologies in different repositories is a better approach than a single monorepo (2) blindnet.dev will host all related documents, making it the de-facto entry point to the devkit.

We are still discussing making a central repository with git submodules or subtrees to ease run and deployment, which would give us an alternate entrypoint.

[tibastral]

Thank you, but my point is not about that : asking stars actually doesn't give you stars (or watchers). What works is creating something that people want to keep track of, and advertise for it.

When I created https://github.com/tibastral/markdownify I never asked people to star my work, but after advertising, I got many stars. and it helped me to sell my vision to my current client (at that time) : not having a wysiwyg editor, but a markdown wysiwygish editor.

My second point isn't clear either : what I wanted to tell you is that when you ask to star the repo, we don't know what we star : is it a website, a technology, a package, a concept, a help desk ?