[cmg]

The 6 minutes makes perfect sense to me - it could be one of those "If I don't reply to this ASAP I will never have time" situations. The notification is right in front of you.

I don't think it's fair to assume any malicious intent here. What would the maintainer gain? People are already extremely aware of the situation. It's not a huge repo, there's no ask for financial donations or anything like that.

[zamadatix]

Counter-propaganda, which is exactly what the author later explicitly asks for both in the thread and (unverifiably) on the HN thread itself now. Of course they'd want that regardless if it was staged or not but there are more motives in life than a few bucks donation to your old GitHub project... particularly when your country is being invaded and an extremely false story being fed to the population of the invading country.

Or it could not be and just grew into propaganda naturally but that's why it's "Very suspect, impossible to prove" not "certainly staged, proven". Either way probably a good event but that doesn't mean we know whether or not it was staged just that the circumstances don't allow us to answer that question reliably.