Fair enough, and to be clear, I'm nowhere near 2.6k stars, although the project has grown quickly with no promotion.

The only reason I pulled that particular indicator out of the hat was to provide some reasonable benchmark for comparison.

But perhaps it was not a reasonable benchmark, after all.

I would think merged pull-request (aka community patches that doesn't suck) would be a better indicator on gh - at least for open source project. Fixed issues a close second.

Linux and LLVM have no merged pull requests on Github. And a lot of these "Awesome x" (Node.js, Rust, Go, React, etc) will merge just about anything.

Also, I know of several project that fix tons of issues, but are relatively unpopular (perhaps because they have so many issues?).

I think the bottom line is there are no perfect indicators of open source project popularity.

Linux has lots of merged patches though. That they don't have merged prs isn't surprising as they handle patches via email.

Our project has 295 stars and 1+ million installs. Stars is definitely not a reliable indicator.

Don't know how common it is but I for one use the starring function to tag projects that I'm not using! This is so I've got a note of it to look at later.

For projects I'm actively using, I'll either have a fork, or just a clone of the repo locally.