The issue with that is, it's a game that never ends. Now you need to inflate your npm/brew/dnf installs, then your website traffic to not make it to obvious, etc.
replyI am not successful at all with my current projects (admittedly am not trying to be nowadays), so feel free to dismiss this advice that predates a time before LLM driven development, but in the past, I have had decent success in forums interacting with those with a specific problem my project did address. Less in stars, more in actual exchange of helpful contributions.
An open source project really shouldn't be something you need to "get off the ground." If it provides value then people will naturally use it.
replyHow do people know it exists to solve their problem? Even before LLMs it was hard to get through VC funded marketing by (commercial) competitors.
replyMy first Open Source project easily got off the ground just by being listed in SourceForge.
Haha, have you tried that? I think in this day and age marketing is much needed activity even for open-source projects providing quality solutions to problems.
replyI maintain a niche-popular project that I didn't do any marketing for. My understanding is that even for popular projects, the usual dynamic is that there's just one guy doing all the work. So "getting off the ground" just means getting people to use it, and there shouldn't be any reason to artificially force that.
replyIt depends what your objective is. Many people seem to see their open source projects as a stepping stone into some commercial activity. Putting aside whether that is a good idea or not if that is what they want to do then they will need to market in some way.
reply