How we made it to 1 Trending repository in GitHub

After working on our project NSFW Filter for 2 months, we made it to #1 repository in Javascript today.

I wanted to share what we did along the way to reach here and how you can too.

Not that making it to #1 is totally necessary, it helps people discover and contribute to your project and I believe that makes your project even awesome(r).

NSFW Filter is a web extension that uses AI to BLOCK NSFW content. It is available in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Here is the stuff that I think made our project popular:

Good Documentation: At first I was the only one working on this and I made it open-source in GitHub at an early stage of development. I made sure that I wrote a good README that would help developers use and contribute to the project.

Spreading the word: To get your first users and contributors you need to spread the word about your project. Once it gains initial traction, then people will spread the word for you. Here are the channels in which I shared about my project:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/show: This is the place where we got the most views.

• Reddit: The second most users came from Reddit r/webdev.

• Product Hunt: We released it on Product Hunt and even got featured. That was something we did not expect but it drove a lot of traffic to our project.

• http://www.echojs.com/: Lot of users were from here too.

• https://dev.to/t/javascript: This is a good place to talk about your project and get feedback.

• Twitter: YEAH! TWEET IT! tweet it with relevant hashtags and there are a lot of bots that retweet certain hashtags.

Timing: Timing is key when it comes to sharing the project. You need to take into account the Time Zone and the Time of the Day to post your project to gain more users. You can post to different channels at different times to get to users from all over the World.

Write an Article: Talk about your project in an article on platforms like Medium and Hacker Noon. That is a good way to get people interested in your project.

Once you gain some traction other channels and publications would share your project with their users.

Our project was mentioned in some channels like JavaScript Weekly and from there, it markets itself.

If you would like to check out our project here is the link to the repo.

I hope you find this useful! Kudos open-source!