Ask HN: With open source software, how do I find out where my users come from?
3 comments
Same here with "bmc": https://pypi.org/project/bmc/, stats here: https://pypistats.org/packages/bmc
It's a MinIO admin Python wrapper we use for a product. There was a "won't fix" issue on MinIO's GitHub, and I wrote bmc to address that issue. People have been reaching out on Twitter or through the issue itself to know if they can use the library, and I put it on PyPI after that. It's super niche (solves one issue for a software that's not that common).
I've had conversations with some of its users as in "It's been months since you're using it and haven't heard of you", and they say that it's been working fine since then.
It's a MinIO admin Python wrapper we use for a product. There was a "won't fix" issue on MinIO's GitHub, and I wrote bmc to address that issue. People have been reaching out on Twitter or through the issue itself to know if they can use the library, and I put it on PyPI after that. It's super niche (solves one issue for a software that's not that common).
I've had conversations with some of its users as in "It's been months since you're using it and haven't heard of you", and they say that it's been working fine since then.
The first thing I would do is check if your Github repository is showing the traffic source. If your primary documentation is on Github, then you would expect most people to visit it in order to figure out how to use your software.
I think the increased traffic is due to something more popular now depending on OP's library. Their users won't come to its repository for documentation.
Yeah, that was my initial thought, too. However, why was it only a short spike then? A dev branch that got merged into master by accident? Also, none of the projects that depend on my repo (as listed on github) have a lot of traction.
Yeah, I did. There wasn't much there. A few more people than usual but well within the margin of error. The majority being referred from Google.
Hmm... not really found another way of doing this. Would be very keen on seeing what others are doing.
Set Google Alerts - someone probably posted a blog, tutorial or a course on network visualization and mentioned your software.
Good idea. I just set that up. I did do some manual googling around but could not find anything.
I would love to hear how other people that have open source projects are getting their intel into their user base.
[1] https://github.com/paulbrodersen/netgraph
[2] https://pepy.tech/project/netgraph