[whatever_dude]

This is interesting, but it raises questions, mainly: if a project is abandoned and you've still given it a star, does it continue to send money to it? Will it cause people to un-star projects?

I could see having some kind of "tip amount" per project that gets taken from a pool would make a lot of sense, but not as stars.

[winsome]

Doesn't that problem still exist though? Say you sponsor a project individually and it eventually goes unsupported. Would your sponsorship live on if you never manually cancelled it?

Using stars as a proxy for sponsorship, I think, is the wrong idea anyhow. Sponsorship should imply star, but not the inverse. I think what would be best is an easy way to sift through your starred projects and "upgrade" them to a sponsorship. Then once you've done that once, you can manage stars and sponsorships independently going forward.

[mgalgs]

They could factor in the repo's "pulse". More active projects get a bigger slice.

[mietek]

No, they shouldn’t, because doing that would incentivise improper activity.