Hi HN, I am writing and maintain a open source python library for making network visualisations [1]. Since that is a fairly specialised task, the software typically only gets a couple dozen downloads a day on PIPy (the python package index). It is a labor of love, not my source of income, so that is totally fine by me.
However, last weekend, there was a huge spike in downloads: instead of the 0-5 downloads that are typical for a normal weekend day, there were 2000 downloads, both on Saturday and Sunday [2]. I would love to know what happened here, or at least, I would like to be able to find out the next time something like this happens. Obviously, unlike a normal business, I don't control the distribution, so I can't measure the traffic with Google Analytics or similar tools.I would love to hear how other people that have open source projects are getting their intel into their user base.
[1] https://github.com/paulbrodersen/netgraph
[2] https://pepy.tech/project/netgraph