How my simple Github project went viral

These clones are scattered across many communities. So I thought, why not create a general list of all these clones that people we could bookmark and come back to in the future. To be honest, I wasn’t sure at the time if such a list would be useful to others. I had the opportunity to find out by creating it myself!

How I made the list

1. Scraping Reddit

I wanted to find all posts containing the keyword “clone”. At first I used the standard Reddit search: reddit.com/r/reactjs/search/?q=clone&source=recent&restrict_sr=1&sort=new (it means search all posts in subreddit reactjs with the keyword “clone” and sort by newest). This request returned all posts, including low-quality posts with a rating of 0, questions about how to create a clone of a service, etc. It would be difficult to find good clone projects from this dump. Therefore, I used the site redditsearch.ioproviding advanced filtering capabilities of Reddit, for example, returning posts with at least 10 “likes” published in a certain period of time, etc.

Next, I created a list of all these clones, their Github repos, demo links, technology stack. Everything was done by hand.

I also googled “open-source alternatives” and found several fully functional clones of Slack, Airtable, Bit.ly, Evernote, Google analytics, etc. I also added them to the list.

So, there are two types of projects on the list. The former look very similar (from a UI point of view), but not fully functional, the latter are fully functional, but with a different UI (to avoid copyright issues, etc.).

Come up with a name for the project

I named my project after the 2008 television animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and kept a similar color scheme.

The Animated Series Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Clone Wars Github Project

2. Nice display of the table

I’ve worked with markdown before, but this is my first time creating markdown tables and it turns out that the table on the project’s Github page looks terrible. Especially if it is a long table with many columns. I wanted to make it prettier (with the title constantly hanging at the top), that is, the project had to be deployed somewhere else. But it still had to be on Github so that other people could conveniently work with it. I decided to host it on my personal website https://gourav.io…

My site was built with NextJS, and I already used markdown (mdx) to write posts, so it was enough to just copy and paste the markdown file from my Github project to a new page. https://gourav.io/clone-wars… In addition, I used Tailwind CSS with the “typography” plugin to improve the readability of tables and other text.

I was thinking about raising automation to the next level, for example, when making a change to a Github project or merging pull requests (PR), it would be possible to update the table on my site https://gourav.io/clone-wars… But I decided not to overcomplicate the system because the changes were not that frequent.

Making the project go viral

I posted a post on 2-3 subreddits and it took off.

reddit.com/r/reactjs

reddit.com/r/webdev

Effects

After the project gained some popularity, many developers began to use PR to add clones to the list of their projects. When I started the project, there were about 75 clones, but now there are more than 120, and I often get new PRs.

I learned from a friend that the project got into the mailing list React Newsletter… A very unexpected and pleasant moment.

People started tweeting about Clone wars… @nickbulljs provided an idea for developers looking for work.

Recruiters are tired of weather apps and expense calculators.

Here’s a smarter development idea:

1. Choose one site from more than 70 open-source clones of popular sites like Netflix, Instagram and others using the link below.
2. Explore the codebase.
3. Create your own clone.

gourav.io/clone-wars

After this tweet, I got over 150 new followers.

And another person gave me $ 5 at the link BuyMeACoffeewhich I added to my project. Thank you stranger.

In 30 days after the launch of the project, my personal site was visited by more than 40 thousand people, and the project received more than 80 thousand views.

Here are some of the statistics on users (the first 30 days after launch, i.e. after posting to Reddit):

Referral sites

Users by country

Users by OS

Users by browser

At the moment the project has and …

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