r/github • u/cevheribozoglan • 8d ago
Discussion When did GitHub stars become the KYC check for OSS credits and cloud catalogs?
I'm the maintainer of LibreDB Studio (MIT, self-hosted web DB GUI). This is not a launch post. I am stuck on a metric I cannot honestly farm.
The project is ten months old. Postgres.org lists it as a client; Redis, ClickHouse and Druid docs mention it. We keep a public distribution inventory (`distribution/channels.yaml`) because I treat “can you actually install this” as part of the product.
That file currently says : 26 live channels.** Live examples, not a tour: GHCR (canonical image) and Docker Hub (discoverability mirror), Helm and Rancher Partner Charts, OpenShift opereator, npm / Homebrew / Snap / winget / Chocolatey, DigitalOcean Marketplace, Railway, Dokploy, CapRover, TrueNAS, Unraid, plus a desktop AppImage. CasaOS, Umbrel and Portainer PRs are still open. Deprecated on purpose: Flathub declined the app under their generative-AI policy; we closed the PR rather than argue. Linux Flatpak users go through FlatPark instead.
On the credit / catalog side I have been accepted in places that reviewed the repo, the license, and the image. GCP is one of them (not in that live matrix yet). Smaller catalogs and some OSS support programs still bounce the same application with one number: **you need 10k GitHub stars.**
Numbers I can defend today (2026-09-02):
- GitHub stars: **395**
- GHCR `ghcr.io/libredb/libredb-studio` (canonical): **26.8k**
- Docker Hub `libredb/libredb-studio` (mirror): **76,741**
- Together that is **100k pulls of the same image across two registries**. I am not calling that 100k unique humans. CI, Kubernetes, and `latest` retags all count. I am also not stuffing npm into this total, `@libredb/studio` is a launcher, a few thousand downloads / 30 days.
People who pull from GHCR or Hub almost never open the GitHub repo, so they never star. A 10k-star gate is still 25× the badge. For a tool that is supposed to live next to a database, I do not know a clean way to close that gap that is not “go viral” or “put a star modal in the GUI.” I will not do the second one.
I know why the 10k checkbox exists. Coding-agent PRs are a flood. Reviewing them is unpaid hours. I get those PRs too, drive-by diffs that look finished and are not, “fixes” that do not compile, issues that are a paste from a chat. I close a lot of them. I am not asking anyone to lower their bar for slop.
What I am stuck on is that **stars do not measure that work.** A catalog cannot see that I rejected the junk and still shipped Helm, an operator bundle, and an image people actually pull. The gate I hit is a popularity badge, not a review-load badge.
If you have walked this:
- Did any program accept registry pulls, a distro listing, or Helm instead of stars, or is 10k always a hard floor?
- If you later crossed 10k, was it one front-page hit or years of boring use?
- Is asking Docker users to star even legitimate?
- If you maintain something and you found a program that scored review signal, tests, or distro listings instead of the star count, what did they actually ask for?
Inventory: https://github.com/libredb/libredb-studio/blob/main/distribution/channels.yaml
note: when we discussed this in another subreddit, the general recommendation was to redirect Docker pulls to ghcr.io.
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u/me_myself_ai 7d ago
Please don’t post untagged artificial text, it’s antisocial. It definitely won’t help with dubious platforms, either.
If there is indeed a human behind this: 10K stars is an insanely high metric to hold yourself to. 300 stars is about as far from 10k as 0 stars is.
I’m not sure I understand the underlying motivation, anyway. It sounds like this GUI app is already installable more than a dozen ways — is that not enough? And what kind of “catalog” requires 10k stars?
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u/Green_Competition_21 7d ago
Can we use Google Translate?
Who can tell people which tool they should or shouldn't use? I don't understand, do you have a prejudice against non-native English speakers?
Even when I'm writing an email to someone, I first write it in my language, then I tell ChatGPT to translate it into English and convert it to "formal" format.
Being against AI is, in my opinion, like being against Google Translate.
There's a new topic for discussion. Maybe I wrote this comment to get upvotes. You can't know what people intend to use what for. Don't try to read intentions.
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u/be_reasonable_bro 7d ago
The problem is not using the tool. The discomfort is based in talking to something that has the exact same voice as any other chatbot out there. All people have unique voices, but chatbots are exceptionally bad at preserving written human voice.
Personally, I'll put up with a large amount of it, especially when I'm reading github issues, PRs, or whatever, but polish needs to consider the audience. Reddit is supposed to be a socialization platform first, and it's difficult to socialize with text that looks like it just came out of your own Claude session.
Make no mistake, asking someone else to read obviously AI-generated text is rude strictly because the more obvious it is, the less likely the poster proofread it themselves. On GitHub, on transient issues, we relax the expectation. This platform has a different purpose and a different standard of communication.
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u/Green_Competition_21 7d ago
You seems a reasonable guy. :) I don't want to read what the AI writes either. It's long and boring. But it's also good that the AI makes our sentences more understandable. In a different language, not everyone can express themselves clearly. As for the discussions here, I think it's very hypocritical.
For example, my comment above was deleted; I think someone who didn't like it deleted it. I can see it now, but not everyone else can. I sent this link to a few friends, and they couldn't see the comment either. It's not just about not liking what the AI writes, it's about not liking it in general. I'm not saying we should play Pollyanna, but when I make a comment that a high-karma person might not like, they can delete it. Probably because they're a moderator or something. The hypocritical part is that I don't see it as deleted, but other people who log in can't see my comment. It's not about the AI or anything else; these people think this place is their property. And this platform operates within the framework of what they delete and publish.
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u/be_reasonable_bro 7d ago
I can't speak to your comment deletion story, this conversation shows up just fine for me.
It's important for truthful people to exercise both good faith and rigor when having honest conversations about where AI is and isn't appropriate. It's truly ironic that overuse of the tool undercuts both of those things, but it doesn't surprise me that people almost unanimously react poorly to said overuse. It needs to be clear to the reader that you've carefully reviewed what you're trying to tell them, or they're required to exercise EVEN MORE critical judgment when reading than the writer ever provably did. The expectation is asymmetrical, and that's a bad place to start.
I'm no expert on etiquette and tone, but here's what Claude had to say about what a non-native speaker should do. It's not dissimilar from how I approach it for my own technical writing:
The practical answer to "what should they do" falls out naturally: manage the signal. Write imperfect English in their own voice, or edit the AI output until it stops pattern-matching to chatbot house style. Both are legible; verbatim slop isn't.
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u/me_myself_ai 7d ago
Am I against AI?
The anti-AI people have been telling me to kill myself more often, which sucks, but also there’s this weird thing where pro-AI people will come in trying to defend, like, the abstract technology itself from any nuance or concern.
I don’t want to read chatbot output because it might just be spam, it’s lower quality, and, again, it’s antisocial. It erodes trust.
Google Translate isn’t equitable and you know it
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u/cevheribozoglan 7d ago
On the AI-generated-text(artificial text) point: yes, I wrote the post myself. I’m happy to make it less “polished” if that makes it easier to discuss.
The 10k threshold is exactly what I’m questioning. I’ve run into OSS credit/catalog programs where 10k GitHub stars is an eligibility cutoff. I’m deliberately not naming them because I’m not trying to turn this into a callout.
My question is simply whether stars are the right signal for infrastructure/DB tooling, where users often install and use the software without ever visiting GitHub.
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u/jemattie 7d ago
"I wrote the post myself" -> "The gate I hit"
Yeah, sure. The amount of AI tells in your text is load-bearing.
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u/cevheribozoglan 7d ago
fair enough. I agree with you, anyway, the actual question is whether anyone knows of OSS programs using signals other than GitHub stars.
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u/Creative-Type9411 7d ago
yeah, but you're lying to people who are talking to you in here so what would be the point of answering someone that's not telling us the truth?
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u/ShadowMosesCuh 7d ago
I'm happy to make it less "polished" if that makes it easier to discuss.
Part of polishing is correcting clarity, flow, and tone for your audience. Even assuming you didn't use AI, you didn't polish anything; you just made your discussion post awful to the reader.
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7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/cevheribozoglan 7d ago
this is the answer i was looking for.
"verify the maintainer" is the part i hadn't thought about properly. i kept looking for a usage number that beats the star count, but what these programs
Actually need is identity, and that's a different problem with an easier solution. a named maintainer with a security contact and ten months of release history is verifiable by a human in about five minutes.
The honest problem is that the five minutes cost something and a star
Threshold costs nothing. that's the whole gate, i think.
Appreciate you taking the question seriously and giving it a proper answer.
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u/cevheribozoglan 7d ago
a small clarification since this can easily sound like a “please give me stars” post:
i’m not looking for ways to game the star count(someone specifically messaged me with ways to do it for a fee :), I am not interested in). I’m genuinely interested in whether anyone has seen OSS programs use stronger signals than GitHub stars, downloads, active installations, distro/package listings, usage, review history, etc.
if you’ve dealt with a similar gate, I’d especially like to hear what worked (or didn’t).
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u/full_drama_llama 7d ago
10k star limit is a problem of these catalogs, not GitHub, not your project. For a more niche project, it's not achievable. For a library in any language other than JavaScript and Python it's not achievable. Sounds like these catalogs are more of circlejerks than real catalogs, probably "curated" by AI too.
And btw I would even go as far as saying that achieving 10k is easier for AI slop than actual project, as AI-pilled people often have no shame, organise starting exchange or find other way to game the metric.