Stars are just a signal. When I am looking at multiple libraries that do the same, I am going to trust more a repo with 200 starts that one with 0. Its not perfect, but I don't have the time to go through the entire codebase and try it out. If the repo works for me I will star it to contribute to the signal.

I use stars for bookmarking purposes, i wouldn't care if they go private but would miss the feature

Same along with lists. I've got more than a thousand starred repos by now.

Sadly lists had a hard cap at 32 or 36 or something like that.. i was too eager early with my specificity (hav elists w 1 repo) and now i cant make new ones (need to delete others)

lol

found a couple non-maintained projects for managing them

https://github.com/astralapp/astral https://github.com/gkze/gh-stars

If that works for you, great. I don't do that. I don't even check how many stars it has.

I check the docs, features, and sometimes the code quality. Sometimes I check the date of the last commit.

I tend to put more attention on repos with 15-75 (ish) stars. Less is something obscure or unproven maybe, and above ~500 is much more likely to be BS/hype.

Github was a "social network" from its very beginning. The whole premise was geared around git hosting and "social coding". I don't think it became enshittified later since that was the entire value proposition from day 1.

There are tons of places you can use for simple git hosting. The only reason to use github over the others is due to the social factors. Because everyone already has an account on it so they can easily file issues, PRs, etc. For simple git hosting, github leaves a lot to be desired.

See the tagline under the logo, May 14, 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080514210148/http://github.com...

I'm sorry, but I never read the main github site. I only spend a few seconds on it when my login expires and I need my repository list.

99.99999% of my interaction is via git pull and push :)

You may like Drew Devault’s https://sr.ht more