Comment by 16bitvoid
3 days ago
Community size and positive community feedback, which is somewhat tangential to progress, which I assume is in the context of development. Also, the rate at which the original freenet community declines.
Number of contributors or pull requests isn't a good metric at the moment since the advent of Claude Code et al. has seen a dramatic uptick in both everywhere.
How is it tangential? Technical success is the primary driver of community growth, adoption, and long-term viability. The more it can do, and the better it does it, the more people will use it.
Community growth might imply technical success (debatable), but technical success does not imply community growth.
You can have a very technically successful project, but it doesn't mean it'll be used.
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