LeafWiki has 603 stars on GitHub right now. By the time you read this, that number is already wrong.
Fourteen months since the first release. Not a round number, but that’s the actual gap, so I’m using it. If you pull up the star history, it looks like a hockey stick — flat for most of a year, then a near-vertical line at the end. That’s not how it felt while it was happening. It felt like a handful of separate moments, months apart, that only add up to a curve if you squint at it after the fact. Here’s what actually happened, in order.
A quiet release nobody noticed
v0.1.0 went live on April 30, 2025. No launch post, no announcement. The first commit message still says “LeafWiki is alive” — I kept the old releases folder around just because that line is in there.
I built it for myself. A friend and I had complained about Wiki.js over a beer — I wrote about that part separately. This is about what came after the beer.
Nothing happened for a while. That was fine. I hadn’t built it for anyone else yet.
The issue that came after a long summer
Months went by. Then, after a quiet summer with barely any activity, someone filed an issue.
That’s it. That’s the whole milestone. One issue, from someone I didn’t know, on a project I’d half-forgotten to keep pushing on.
It’s a strange thing to admit, but that single issue is what got me building faster again. Not a star count, not a mention anywhere — one person taking the project seriously enough to report a bug.
Someone who said he’d help, then went quiet
The project was sitting at around 50 stars — nothing much — when I labeled a few issues “good first issue,” hoping someone would pick one up. Someone did. He commented that he’d take it on.
Then nothing. No pull request, no update, no message saying he’d changed his mind. He just never came back.
No hard feelings — that’s just how a lot of open source goes. People show up for exactly as long as they meant to, and they don’t owe you an explanation for leaving. I don’t think about it as a loss.
A pull request I almost missed
Later, someone else opened a PR without asking first — no issue, no discussion, just a change. Then he closed it himself, before I’d even seen it.
I found it later, reopened it, and pinged him to say the idea behind it was good. If I hadn’t noticed, he’d probably have been gone for good.
That person has stuck around and supported the project ever since. I’m keeping the details vague here by their preference, but it’s one of the clearest examples I have of something I didn’t expect going into this: the people who end up caring most aren’t always the ones who show up loudest first.
Sergio, and the first person who kept paying
The first recurring sponsor showed up a while after that — Sergio, who’d been filing issues and testing versions for months already. That story is its own post, so I won’t retell it here. Short version: he started paying every month without saying a word first, and I still think about that.
Posting it, for the first time
I don’t spend much time on social media. Writing the code never scared me. Posting it anywhere outside GitHub did.
I put up a Hacker News submission for the “ops team” post — just a link to the blog, nothing more.
Self-hosted wikis shouldn’t need an ops team — 10 points, 2 comments. Not a viral moment by HN standards.
A few days after that post, someone I’d never interacted with before sponsored the project — a single, one-time payment, not a recurring one. Not Sergio, someone else entirely. The first time anyone had paid anything for LeafWiki without it turning into an ongoing thing.
Then, a few days after that, came the post that actually moved the star count.
The post that actually moved the number
I’d already written a few dev.to posts and picked up a small, steady trickle of users from those. Posting about the v0.10.0 release on r/selfhosted felt exactly as uncomfortable as the Hacker News post had — same nerves, different platform.
72 stars in one day. Then 64 the day after. That’s still the single largest jump in the entire history of the project — bigger than every press mention combined. One honest post about a release did more than months of quiet building.
Two mentions I didn’t ask for
Self-Hosted Weekly mentioned LeafWiki once as a regular app listing, then featured it in their spotlight section a week later. Go Weekly picked it up not long after — that one landed differently. No single-day spike; the stars came in steadily over the following day instead, closer to how people actually read a newsletter than how they scroll a feed.
I didn’t pitch either one. Someone just noticed and wrote about it.
Where that leaves things
603 stars. A handful of sponsors. One person who filed an issue after a long silence and got me building again. One contributor who came and went. One who stayed. Still one person — me — writing the code, on evenings and weekends, next to actual client work.
What’s actually changed is the room around it. Most feature requests now come from people using LeafWiki for things I never anticipated. Some just tell me what’s missing. A few build it themselves and open a PR instead of a wishlist. Discussions that used to sit unanswered for weeks now get real back-and-forth, sometimes before I’ve even seen them myself.
If you’re building something in public and it doesn’t feel like it’s compounding — it probably isn’t, not smoothly. Mine didn’t. It moved in steps, and most of the steps were just one person doing one small thing at exactly the right moment. You only see the line if you draw it backward.
LeafWiki is still free, still open source, still on GitHub if you want to look at where all of this actually lives.