> I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project.
Well "stars" are kind of like that. Also the insights page tells you how many times your repo is being cloned per day, so that's one metric you can use to see how "used" your project is. You can also search GitHub for the name of your project and see how many other projects are cross referencing it.
"stars", at least from my perspective, doesn't map to usage. I've stared plenty of projects I don't use. I like the latter two metrics - thank you for sharing!
Devil's advocate: no action short of landing your own project will prove that you use a library. I've donated to stuff like Godot (which I have yet to open myself) and Blender (which I only know the bare basics of; I haven't even tried the new UI overhaul) years back because they are projects I appreciate an open source alternative for these very complex problems.
of course, giving cash is a much bigger gesture than just pressing a star button, but it sounds like the star button is closer in vein to the kinds of acknowledgement people are asking for here.
One thing you may encounter is that a large company may be using it for many things internally, and that still shows up as just a handful of clones, because they have some central artifact caching service in place.
The problem with stuff like stars or even lists of "who uses this" is that they need to be refreshed every so often. Just because someone used your project ten years ago, doesn't mean they're using it today. Maybe a list with a "latest update" date and gently asking and reminding people to update it each year if they're still using the project would help...
As for cloning, I don't clone projects I use every day. Maybe I cloned them once a year ago. Maybe I'm using a package from somewhere and not interacting with your repo at all.
The cross-referencing sounds like a useful metric though, at least for open source use, but many projects are more useful in non-open-source environments (eg how many open source projects are using something like http://riemann.io/ ?)
It would be nice to have a similar system to the language metric at the bottom of a repo, have something like a library metric that list what external libraries a project uses and feed those metrics back to the maintainers.
The social stars aspect of GitHub is what makes it toxic. I would support more visibility for open, not centralized initiatives like humans.txt and contribute.json (https://www.contributejson.org/).
Well "stars" are kind of like that. Also the insights page tells you how many times your repo is being cloned per day, so that's one metric you can use to see how "used" your project is. You can also search GitHub for the name of your project and see how many other projects are cross referencing it.