[apothegm]

How are people supposed to have heard of it at all?

What’s their incentive to switching to an unknown OSS solution that may or may not be maintained in a year, from their current stable and maintained solution?

How can they be confident your code is safe and won’t intentionally or inadvertently open backdoors on their dev machine or introduce vulnerabilities to their app?

“If you build it, they will come” only works in the movies.

[kiraken]

How would someone prove that it’s safe, good, and market it? Asking for your opinion here.

[apothegm]

Does it solve a burning need that most people can’t solve for themselves and that’s severe enough to be worth paying for? Start doing direct outreach (but not AI spam, please).

Have friends who are editors or staff writers at major (topical) publications? Wrangle a mention.

Satisfied with very gradual growth? Seed your friend, family, colleague networks; get people who already trust you using it. Make it awesome enough for each person who uses it to want to actively recommend it to other people.

Otherwise? Unless it’s a huge, perfect match for the zeitgeist and you’ve got enough of a social media following to give it an immediate boost for a chance at virality (think openclaw having its moment, further assisted by the moltbook novelty factor), you’d better have a heck of an advertising and PR budget.

But also, if this is an open source library, why does it matter so much to you to have people use it?