[sjadoinqwoeihad]

I checked my 5 year old repository of ~300 stars. It has a ~100 unique clones a month. So if the average was half of it then the 1 order of magnitude would be quite an accurate approximation.

I think the biggest difference with a clone and a star is that a star requires an account and some vested interest in the social network of Github. Anyone who is not interested in the social aspect can just bookmark it.

I guess this differs quite a lot by target demographic. A tool for GPT will probably get a lot more stars than a plugin for some consumer software simply because it is more targeted for the audience of people who have Github accounts.

[cs702]

Thank you for sharing your anecdata. In my experience, the number of clones per month is much higher at first, and then decays gradually until it settles into a stable run-rate, so it's likely that you've had more than 100 x 12 x 5 clones over those five years -- i.e., between one and two orders of magnitude the number of stars, 300.

[jefftk]

Another data point: icdiff is 13y old with 4k stars and 200 unique clones in the past month.

(This is a tool that most people install and run without any interaction with GitHub, since it is in package managers)