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 😟