Basically any Github metric in isolation doesn't mean much. Anecdotally, I once worked on a ML framework in Rust[0]. For at least a few months after release the metrics looked good on paper (Top 5 Rust project by stars at the time) and also had a few smaller contributors. Sadly next to no actual adoption and no healthy community around it that was able to pick it up after we had to stop maintenance.
Downloads are about as bad. Just have one or a few users that have CI or deployment patterns that download the package a lot, and your numbers lost any meaning.
Thanks for sharing and I am sorry for your project. It was a cool idea. Any idea why no actual adoption? Is this possibly because of the product-market fit mentioned in this post?
I am thinking aloud here: maybe the product-market fit, project-community fit and the value-market fit were not so clearly separated or sequential but more interrelated from the very beginning. You have to find the value-market fit and define the business problem first and then the community will thrive? The value to the community is not only what the project can bring to the business, but also the value this project can bring to its contributors and adopters.
I would say the main reason probably was that it wasn't really usable. We first optimized for performance, so that we were able to show that we are competitive there and neglected usability. Anything more than a simple MNSIT example was incredibly verbose.
Adoption would've probably come with some time (and there was quite some interest in the niche), but the project was a last ditch effort of our dying startup, so we didn't have enough time really.
Basically any Github metric in isolation doesn't mean much. Anecdotally, I once worked on a ML framework in Rust[0]. For at least a few months after release the metrics looked good on paper (Top 5 Rust project by stars at the time) and also had a few smaller contributors. Sadly next to no actual adoption and no healthy community around it that was able to pick it up after we had to stop maintenance.
Downloads are about as bad. Just have one or a few users that have CI or deployment patterns that download the package a lot, and your numbers lost any meaning.
[0]: https://github.com/autumnai/leaf