Beyond GitHub Stars: Tracking Real Adoption of My Open-Source Projects

I've been maintaining open-source tools for years. For most of that time, I had no idea if anyone was actually using them. Few stars. Not forks. Downloads — the thing that tells you someone ran your binary at least once. The problem GitHub shows download counts per release asset — but only the current total. No history. Was there a spike after that blog post you wrote? Did your last release get picked up faster than the one before? Is your project quietly dying, or just slow to spread? Stars are worse: people star repos they never use. A project with 500 stars might have 3 regular users. npm/crates.io/PyPI have their own dashboards — they are nice for libraries and source downloads, but don't show packaged/pre-built release trends and miss the GitHub release binary entirely. As an OSS maintainer of binary (not library), you're flying blind on actual adoption. What I wanted Historical view: downloads over time, per release Trend detection: growing, stagnating, or declining? Cross-releas