I thought the star button was a convenient way to keep track of projects you're interested in.

> is it really considered so unusual for a someone to express gratitude to an open-source project?

I would say yes, it's very unusual. The general lack of basic civility is, in my opinion, just one more reason for the lack of diversity in projects and lowers the number of contributors to open source.

> I thought the star button was a convenient way to keep track of projects you're interested in.

Not exactly, as star numbers are made public, meaning it's also a form of public approval.

Good point. I had a cross project issue come in to a small project of mine a few years ago. The maintainers of the other project actually brought up their much larger number of stars to (try to) belittle me. Since that day I’ve noticed the correlation between stars and the kind of response I’m apt to get, negative in both senses.

More like a form of popularity, not necessarily approval.

Two times recently I wanted to express thanks (or just ask a question) and couldn't. In both cases there was no way to message the person via GitHub because they'd not publically shared their email address. In one case there was no way to open an 'issue'. And in the other, it wasn't relating to a repo, but a really excellent tutorial.

In the olden times, we all just used email all the time for everything. It would've been bizarre for someone to work in open source and not have their email publically available. The funny thing is, I haven't shared my email on my GitHub either! I'm going to fix that today.

If you clone the repo, you will see the mail addresses of authors and committers.

One bit might be a bit less than people would like to express a large range of human emotions arising in a large range of circumstances.