Have you ever looked at a new GitHub star and wondered:
Who is this person, and what are they building?
That question led me to build StarBack.
StarBack is a GitHub-native tool that turns new stargazers into a project discovery feed.
When someone stars your repository, StarBack looks at the public repositories they own, ranks them using signals like activity, stars, forks, description, topics, and homepage, then adds the most interesting project to an Inbox inside your GitHub repository.
No separate dashboard.
No server.
No database.
Everything runs with GitHub Actions, Issues, and the GitHub REST API.
How it works
The flow is roughly:
Someone stars your repo
↓
GitHub Actions runs
↓
StarBack checks their public repositories
↓
Repositories are ranked
↓
The best one is added to your StarBack Inbox
The Inbox is just a normal GitHub Issue, for example:
StarBack Inbox · August 2026
- [ ] user/project-a — TypeScript · ★126
- [ ] another-user/project-b — Rust · ★48
So instead of treating stars as just a number, you can use them as a way to discover developers and projects connected to your own work.
Why I built it
GitHub stars are mostly one-directional.
Someone finds your project, stars it, and usually disappears into the stargazer list.
But many of those people are builders themselves.
I wanted a lightweight way to answer:
“What interesting things are the people discovering my project building?”
I also wanted it to stay completely inside GitHub instead of creating another SaaS dashboard that needs hosting, authentication, a database, and maintenance.
That constraint shaped StarBack into a reusable GitHub Actions workflow.
Installation
StarBack is designed to be added to an existing personal GitHub repository.
You copy two small workflow files into:
.github/workflows/
and configure the required GitHub secret.
After that, new stars can automatically feed projects into your monthly StarBack Inbox.
The ranking
StarBack currently scores repositories using signals including:
- repository stars
- recent activity
- forks
- description
- topics
- homepage
It filters out forks, archived repositories, disabled repositories, and inactive entries.
The goal isn't to find the most popular repository.
It's to surface something that is likely worth looking at.
It's open source
StarBack is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT License.
GitHub:
https://github.com/fly233338/StarBack
It's still an early version, so feedback, bug reports, and ideas are welcome.
I'm especially interested in whether other GitHub maintainers find the “discover projects through your stargazers” idea useful.
And yes — StarBack itself runs the same workflow. If you want to help me test it in the wild, feel free to star the repo and see what happens.
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