Fedeproxy pitch

For traditional social media I think there are studies of network effects and FOMO. But I don’t if anything exists for Github. Personally I know there’s FOMO with me. And I have also heard these same considerations from other maintainers in the past.

It may have been considerations of many of the fedi projects that are on GH, idk.

This starts with visibility. I think (again no metrics) many people do topics searches on Github to find projects of interest. I do that a lot myself. Like I find AP candidates for the fediverse.party watchlists. A similar search on DDG to find repo’s across the web would be so much more inefficient.

I feel being on GH works in your favor, but I can’t make it any harder than gut feeling :slight_smile:

It’s a very wide spread gut feeling :slight_smile: And my compass on the matter is totally broken: I don’t relate to this at all because I don’t use any social media, do not listen to radio, television, read newspapers nor do I stress because I could miss anything, reason why I’m asking you. Thanks for sharing!

If that’s not too personal (I’m not asking you to disclose anything that would be uncomfortable :fearful:) could you share examples or stories about how it manifests itself for you?

If I weren’t operating a whole bunch of social media channels for my community and advocacy stuff, then I’d be more or less in same situation as you :grin:

I long to deep-dive in technical stuff, and it is an attention-killer that hampers deep work, but there’s also an importance to it. Someone has to do it, I guess.


Before giving some examples, first another example of FOMO: Stargazing. Some devs our outright derogatory in anyone mentioning stars on a repo, and you’ll get sarcastic or nasty remarks. But - whatever you think of them - I feel they are very important in terms of netwerk effects that keep people on Github.

Consider a full-stack dev creating a NodeJS project. JS / React / Node… huge ecosystem. Now the initial project setup with "Hello world in it, has 100 billion dependencies. Each additional feature added to the project via another library add a couple billion dependencies more. The dev - creating a platform, full-stack involved - juggles a million tasks. Now suppose they want to add OAuth2 to the platform…

Good chance that library selection goes 1) via NPM search (also MS now) and 2) Github search, or maybe a GH awesome list. Say there are 5 candidate libraries, and the dev checks them one by one. Would they choose the 3 year old project with 100 stars or the 2 year old one with 21k stars? I am sure the dev will first look deeper into the latter project.

Overall: A large number of stars are an implicit indication of ‘quality’. It is not guaranteed in any way, but if thousands of devs gave their star you are more likely to just go with that.

For devs that are used to GH, they can’t have this indication of ‘quality’ via stars on other external forges. A star-comparison metric is only meaningful on a platform with the same amount of members where you know how to gauge it. This star thing puts all other forges at a disadvantage.

So are stars to be considered a bad social media vanity metric? Let’s now consider the situation where there are no stars at all. Now the dev has to delve into the codebase to judge the qualtiy. You might say that is a best-practice anyway, but it is not feasible for all people, requires expertise. How is our full-stack dev able to judge e.g. security aspects of the OAuth2 library? 21k stars are no guarantee for security either, but at least you know 21k pair of eyes went to the project.

Some tech has usage statistics, that can replace stars. “If so many people use it, then I might do as well”.


Now for my personal example. I maintain awesome-humane-tech - a curated list of OSS humane technology projects. I obviously want to advocate and promote this list. It has 1.7k stars at the moment. I did not need to do a lot of promotion to gain these. Also I’ve got 33 contributors who just came in without me asking.

The curated sub-list is part of the awesome project, where the list-of-lists resides. There are numerous very popular awesome lists, people create them spontaneously and spent a lot of effort to get their entry added top-level (there are quality criteria, and ‘branding’ rules). All lists are on GH.

I have also created a derivative of awesome, called the delightful project. It has the same concept, except it is only for FOSS, Open data and Open science related curated lists. And also lists are not restricted to any forge or location.

Though still young I have given quite a bit of promo to the project, received positive response, but thus far only 2 people decided to maintain their own sublists. On the sublists I maintain, I have found co-maintainers on some, but they are thus far not too active. I have had zero PR’s on my own lists and have been most active contributors on the 2 other lists.

Now I don’t mind this too much as the lists are useful to me, and I keeps steadfastly adding resources to them (albeit mostly in candidate issues, waiting to be processed). I expect that - given time - there will be a treshold where this get recognition and the initiative starts to drive itself (i.e. it gains network effects).

Interesting is the response by Sindre Sorhus - creator of Awesome project - when I notified them about my variant of their initiative:

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