New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: With open source software, how do I find out where my users come from?

Ask HN: With open source software, how do I find out where my users come from?
3 by burning_hamster | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, I am writing and maintain a open source python library for making network visualisations [1]. Since that is a fairly specialised task, the software typically only gets a couple dozen downloads a day on PIPy (the python package index). It is a labor of love, not my source of income, so that is totally fine by me. However, last weekend, there was a huge spike in downloads: instead of the 0-5 downloads that are typical for a normal weekend day, there were 2000 downloads, both on Saturday and Sunday [2]. I would love to know what happened here, or at least, I would like to be able to find out the next time something like this happens. Obviously, unlike a normal business, I don't control the distribution, so I can't measure the traffic with Google Analytics or similar tools. I would love to hear how other people that have open source projects are getting their intel into their user base. [1] https://ift.tt/3wheYpv [2] https://ift.tt/3bAnDdJ