// what is this

The quiet part of open source

GitHub Trending shows you what's popular. SilentStars shows you what's worth watching.

// the problem

Stars are a popularity signal, not a quality signal. A project can have 12 stars and ship daily. Another can have 50k stars and be effectively abandoned. GitHub Trending, Hacker News, and most discovery tools reward hype — not craft.

Thousands of maintainers build quietly: consistent commits, closed issues, steady releases. No launch. No Product Hunt. No Twitter thread. Just code.

// how it works

Every night, SilentStars collects data from GitHub and computes two scores per project:

Undervalued Score — activity divided by visibility. High commits, low stars = undervalued.
Health Score — weighted combination of commit recency, cadence, issue resolution, and PR activity.

Projects are classified as Thriving, Newborn, Quiet, At Risk, Watched, Revived, or Archived. On top of that, each project receives behavioral tags — signals like solo_builder, hidden_gem, fork_magnet, or funded — that drive the home page sections. No editorial bias. Pure signal.

→ See all projects

// who runs this

SilentStars is built and maintained by capuz. It runs on GitHub Pages with zero backend — nightly GitHub Actions collect data, Astro builds the static site.

The Bluesky bot @silentstars-radar.bsky.social posts one undervalued project daily.

If SilentStars surfaces a project that changes how you work or think about open source, consider supporting it. Zero cost. Zero backend. Built with care.

// contribute

Know a project that deserves to be tracked? Submit it — projects are reviewed and added manually within 48h.

Submit a project →

score = signal / reach signal = 0.25·commit_velocity // commits in last 90 days (cap 30) + 0.20·contributor_work // unique authors × velocity (cap 100) + 0.20·issue_resolution // closed ÷ total issues + 0.20·fork_ratio // forks ÷ stars (proxy for real usage) + 0.10·release_cadence // releases in 90 days (cap 3) + age_bonus // +0 to +0.30 after 6 months + homepage_bonus // +0.05 if homepage is set reach = log₁₀(stars + watchers + 10)█

health = 0.35·recency // days since last commit (90d decay) + 0.25·cadence // commit rhythm consistency + 0.20·issue_health // closed ÷ total issues + 0.20·pr_health // merged ÷ total PRs█

Healthy 80 – 100 active, responsive, regular releases Stable 60 – 79 maintained, steady, no alarms Quiet 40 – 59 slowing down — watch this one At Risk 0 – 39 going dark · candidate for rescue█

solo_builder one person holds > 80% of commits (last 180d) needs_contributors has open "help wanted" or "good first issue" labels hidden_gem < 100 stars · active in last 3 months · documented legacy_hero repo > 5 years old · committed this year fork_magnet forks/stars > 0.5 · used as template or dependency release_machine 5+ releases in the last 90 days under_pressure > 10 open issues · ≤ 2 contributors · health ≥ 60 community_watch watchers > stars · devs tracking before the public community_hub GitHub Discussions enabled · > 20 discussions funded maintainer has active funding channel█