How to repeatedly make it to Github Trending list?

Why would one want any open-source project to trend on Github?

1. To get more contributors, or
2. To get feedback and ideas to enhance the project, or
3. To get popular among the relevant communities

To make my open-source product trend on Github, I chose to create a playbook by reverse engineering what had worked for successful developers out there. Here are the two things I did to craft the playbook to hit Github Trending consistently and repeatedly.

• 🧐 Stalked the social media activity and posts (on Reddit, HackerNews, Twitter, Dev.to) of many successful open-source developers who have achieved Github trending feat
• 📝 Backed up the observations with statistics — daily Github star pattern of repositories, and upvotes/likes/comments gathered by developers on social media posts.

And once the dopamine of the first Github Trending moment kicked in, I wanted more, more, more. So I sharpened the playbook with more observations and started drawing patterns 🎮.

So here is a Three-point playbook 🏈 📒

Make a successful post to hit ⭐ 500 stars within 24 hour span

You can always argue that not all Github Trending repositories necessarily have 500 stars (in total nor within the last 24 hours). Yes, you are absolutely right!!

But remember — we are talking of a replicable strategy to hit Github Trending. And for that at least 500 stars in your kitty within 24 hours is needed because that’s the pattern among repeatedly trending repositories on Github.

So try to make an intriguing post that can excite and guide developers into your Github page. It can be about anything — (i) the problem you are solving, or (ii) explaining the vision behind solving the problem, or (iii) asking for feedback.

Now, please don’t try to game the Github algorithm by managing 500 stars by asking colleagues, friends & family. The Github algorithm is not that dumb !!

Split your incoming Github traffic from 2+ sources

Ensure that your Github page receives incoming traffic from at least 2 sources. If you achieve more than 2 sources, higher your chances !!

Once you have made a successful social media This could be done through any of the below means:

• Popularizing a successful post across multiple social media channels like Dev.to, Reddit or HackerNews. This is a very low-effort strategy and most of these social media channels are free and you do not have to spend a single dollar.
• Make an influencer tweet about your repository when the first successful post is already picked up.
• Send interesting emailers to target audience. Very tough to make people open email, but if you are good at it you should go for it.
• Do nothing — Simply sit and wait for some twitter-bot or reddit-bot to pick and repost your social media post. And fingers crossed that bot’s repost will also bring in more audience. In the pre-Elon Musk Twitter API pricing this could have worked, but now — I guess you know the answer ;-)

Follow basic Github Etiquette

Now I am not going to talk more about this, because there are already too many posts on the internet about this.

• Beautiful and concise readme
• Good setup documentation
• Contributing Instructions
• Opens Source license
• Logo & Social media thumbnail (this is optional, but makes a lot of difference, when you post on Reddit/ Twitter)

Now if you ensured all the above three points working at the same time and not able to Trend on Github? Or if you did manage to hit Github trending without any of the above?

DM me on Twitter or drop in a comment here. Looking forward to learn from you ;-)