Fourteen months of LeafWiki, in small moments · LeafWiki<br>Blog ·<br>5 July 2026<br>Fourteen months of LeafWiki, in small moments
LeafWiki has 802 stars on GitHub right now. By the time you read this, that number is already wrong.<br>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.<br>A quiet release nobody noticed<br>v0.1.0 went live on April 30, 2025. No launch post, no announcement. The commit that shipped it still says “LeafWiki is alive” — I kept the old releases folder around just because that line is in there.<br>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.<br>Nothing happened for a while. That was fine. I hadn’t built it for anyone else yet.<br>The issue that came after a long summer<br>Months went by. Then, after a quiet summer with barely any activity, someone filed an issue.<br>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.<br>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.<br>Someone who said he’d help, then went quiet<br>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.<br>Then nothing. No pull request, no update, no message saying he’d changed his mind. He just never came back.<br>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.<br>A pull request I almost missed<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>Sergio, and the first person who kept paying<br>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.<br>Posting it, for the first time<br>I don’t spend much time on social media. Writing the code never scared me. Posting it anywhere outside GitHub did.<br>I put up a Hacker News submission for the “ops team” post — just a link to the blog, nothing more.<br>Self-hosted wikis shouldn’t need an ops team — 10 points, 2 comments. Not a viral moment by HN standards.<br>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.<br>Then, a few days after that, came the post that actually moved the star count.<br>The post that actually moved the number<br>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.<br>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.<br>Two mentions I didn’t ask for<br>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.<br>I didn’t pitch either one. Someone just noticed and wrote about it.<br>Where...