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How do people know it exists to solve their problem? Even before LLMs it was hard to get through VC funded marketing by (commercial) competitors.

My first Open Source project easily got off the ground just by being listed in SourceForge.

How will fake stars help it getting of the ground?

My point is that not having fake stars may prevent you from gaining traction.

Organic users still have to consider it, but then they might not dismiss it outright because it has five stars or something.