I would like to know if I can get yours and the communities comment on something.
I have interest in the ecosystem of open-source OTA and device management solutions and I try to keep up to date with things. When I saw your post on HN, I visited your github page (https://github.com/deviceplane/deviceplane) to learn more.
I was a bit surprised by the numbers on the github landing page which showed 800+ stars and 60+ forks. I typically look at these numbers to get a indication of project activity/popularity, obviously not the only metric to look at but normally a pretty good first data point.
This got me interested to learn more, as my initial though was that this project must have been around for a while with an active community. But things did not add up, the project only had 3 contributors (probably people from the company behind the project).
Looking closer at the forks (https://github.com/deviceplane/deviceplane/network/members), majority of them reference a different repository name (npm-algos) which does not seem to at all related to deviceplane. Then it became apparent to me that this must have been a rename of an organization and repository, as https://github.com/npm-algos/npm-algos redirects to https://github.com/deviceplane/deviceplane.
Now I became even more suspicions on what is going on here. So I did a bit more digging using the github API and looking up when the repository got their stars which showed that majority of the 800+ stars came before 2019-01 which was the "initial commit" of the deviceplane repository and the stars where dating back to 2015, so they must have been for the "npm-algos" repository.
Then to the conclusion, it seems that an older unrelated repository was repurposed (renamed) to manipulate metrics on github to provide a misleading view of activity/popularity. I find it hard to believe that something like this happened "accidentally", git repositories are fairly cheap :) and renaming an organization/repository on github is a somewhat involved process.
This is a practice I have never seen before, and not sure I like it. The goal seems to be to mislead users.
Would love to hear thoughts from the deviceplane folks, but also from the HN community.