Impacts of removing /stargazers

[davidmezzetti]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Body

As of June 30 all repositories now return a 404 for /stargazers.

https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-30-upcoming-access-restrictions-to-public-api-endpoints-and-ui-views/

While I somewhat understand the motivation, this has such a huge impact on the overall open source ecosystem. Being able to view stars provided some insights into who likes a project, if they are real accounts etc.

It kills a site like https://www.star-history.com/. This was a valuable resource to study the trend of a project. Did all it's stars just come because of a popular post but then it trailed off or is there sustained interest over time? It's a quick signal that can be used in combination with downloads, issues filed etc.

Sites like https://ossinsight.io/ will also be degraded in functionality.

So while I'm sure there was a good idea behind this change, it's worth reconsidering given what we lose. It's not in the spirit of what GitHub was originally about.

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[AhmadHassan-BTed]

you're not the only one upset about this; I too am, and whole open-source community has been complaining since that changelog dropped : (

GitHub's main excuse for killing /stargazers was to stop bot rings from scraping user lists for spam and to cut down on massive API abuse. But like you said, it completely nuked legit tools like Star History and OSS Insight in the crossfire.

Right now, the only real alternative is using the GraphQL API to get raw counts, but you totally lose the historical timeline and user details. Leaving this feedback here is the best move so their product team sees how badly this broke community tools. Hopefully they walk it back or at least give maintainers a dedicated analytics endpoint.

[davidmezzetti]

That's the idea, get people to speak up.

[AhmadHassan-BTed]

Us developers circle; we are planning to run campaigns on our own; on insta, github, X, reddit, and all the platforms. Hope it'll get it done 😟

[Yiling-J]

The stargazers page was useful when I wanted to check whether a repo might have fake stars. It's not 100% accurate, but if I noticed several stargazers had also starred the same set of repositories, it was a strong signal that something was suspicious. Unfortunately, that's no longer possible.

[TedYav]

Can Github bring back the public version at least in an anonymized fashion? It was useful to see star history for a repo and then compare that against things like how many people talking about it on reddit and other places. Useful signal - now it's like if Amazon hid reviews because some people were scraping the usernames from the reviews.

[vincerubinetti]

Hard agree here. I can understand wanting to hide large numbers of usernames and such, but I don't see why they still couldn't provide timestamps of stars so we can see growth over time. Hoping GitHub eventually plans to re-add a more limited stars endpoint.

[SnoozeFreddo]

Ii created gitranc.com to be able to compare repositories for myself and now i am also affected by this. At least give pro users the ability to do the same thing on the domain github.com.

[davidmezzetti]

Let's hope GitHub sees this thread and perhaps comes up with some compromise solution. Tracking stars over time is a pretty big use case, most of the tooling doesn't care about the user names. Though for those looking into the credibility of the project that does help.

[squidKid-deluxe]

Wholeheartedly agree, it's an extremely useful metric for credibility

[oyasumiaiko]

I strongly oppose this change.

The /stargazers page served far beyond analytics or checking whether stars were legitimate. It played a key role in GitHub’s social and discovery layer.

For small and niche repositories, the list of stargazers was often one of the best ways to discover people working with similar technologies, find related projects through their profiles, understand what kind of community was forming around a repository, and connect with developers who shared the same interests. Many small projects have few issues, pull requests, forks, or discussions, so their stargazer list may be the only visible signal of the people interested in them.

Removing the entire public page because some actors abused it is a disproportionate response. GitHub could address scraping and spam through authentication requirements, stricter rate limits, pagination limits, abuse detection, partial visibility, anonymized historical data, or privacy controls for individual users. Blocking all legitimate access should not be the default solution.

This change turns stars from a public expression of interest into an opaque counter. That weakens project discovery, community formation, ecosystem research, and trust assessment across open source.

Please restore the public stargazers page, even in a limited form, or provide a replacement that preserves both star history and the ability to discover the community around a project.

[squidKid-deluxe]

no, really, read this ^^^

I fully agree with the entirety of it

[gentoorax]

Time to fork github and host our open source projects elsewhere.

In all seriousness not happy about this either

[hexadecimal233]

Literally leaving github.
Furthermore, "You Know" tab means nothing. Only letting the repo owner know does not have any positive effect to us, yet making everything a black box.

Btw, earlier this day, github has sneakily added the stargazer restriction to GraphQL as described in emanuelef/daily-stars-explorer#363.

[SergioFLS]

resending this message i said from another related topic: i feel like visibility to /stargazers on public repositories should at least be limited to users with a minimum age honestly...

[nanonano]

Can someone confirm. Is the /stargazers endpoint now returning a 404 for everyone? Even if you are an admin or collaborator.

[davidmezzetti]

I've only seen this for projects I'm not a part of.

[nanonano]

Thanks for reply, wanted to rule that out. It was my PAT token in the end, didn't have repo scope.

[deevroman]

It's worth noting the absurdity of deprecating /stargazers/you_know. You can't access people you know who stared the repository, but new stars are visible in your news feed, and you can simply browse the list of accounts you follow and view https://github.com/username?tab=stars

[Maximization]

https://nodejstoolbox.com/ is also impacted by this. As the maintainer/curator I'm looking forward to a response from GitHub. I'm sure there's a way to expose star history data for public repository while also preventing misuse.

[FrancescoSaverioZuppichini]

nice so now people can buy stars even more easily

[janpfeifer]

At the very least make "hiding stargazers" optional for repos, and marking it off for existing repos, so it doesn't break anything. New repos the user can chose during creation.

[ian-maurmann]

Not all stars are equal, if I look at a new project and see it has stars from 4 or 5 well known people, I know it's a new project that's going somewhere; vs looking at a new project with 30 stars from faceless accounts.

Not being able to see the people makes stars just a useless and meaningless metric that does not matter at all. The world of software is driven by real people who are coders, not the organizations or companies they hop between, not the tools they hop between, not even the projects they hop between. What matters is the people. SourceForge forgot that, GitHub needs to not make the same mistakes.

[SnoozeFreddo]

This here is the best example of what you are talking about. https://github.com/ruvnet

It's the most obvious botnet botting bot you can find on the internet, and yet even after numerous reports it has not been taken down. You can not verify that all of his repos are bullshit any more. (I mean you can, but not at first glance)

Some of his repos claim 7k forks and are more successful than programming languages themselves. Github has became a soulless company, its just a skeleton moving. If codeberg wasn't that bad, maybe a move would make sense now.

[ian-maurmann]

@SnoozeFreddo Yep, that's a good example!

When the stars, and commits, and forks, and real conversations become tracked as "engagement" statistics, they become meaningless numbers that can be gamed. Instead being able to look around and see real people doing real things, it's just number-go-up, number-go-up, number-go-up.

Not being able to differ the real from the fake, this is what invites the botting behavior in the first place. And you brought up a good point, it's harder to see now, harder to verify what's real vs fake. And I expect the stars being anonymous now will just fuel the botting even more going forward.