I can answer this a bit - I maintain Yarn, a JS package manager. While nowhere near Curl, it does have a fairly significant user base - at least a few million devs, from what I understand. For all this work, I received exactly two emails thanking me for my work during the past four years.

I also happen to maintain a little "Secret Santa" website, hosted on a GitHub page. Nothing too fancy, just a static app that lets you manage a Secret Santa without creating accounts. Well, every year, I receive 3-4 emails thanking me for creating it, which is even more surprising considering they often come from people that aren't from the tech world at all.

Perhaps for my happiness I should invest more in this side project than in a package manager used across the globe :)

First of all, thank you for your work for the community. But I want to put things in context too. I am primarily a backend engineer that work in Ubuntu box and using many Unix tools while maintaining a huge service containing hundred of OSS libraries. You can imagine If I have to thanks every one of them then I won't be able to do my real works. Also I don't think someone like Mr. Torvald would appreciate me adding more noise to his inbox because of my garbage email ;)

I don't write JS much but even so I'm pretty sure I've used yarn a couple of times and it Just Worked. Thanks :)

Also wanted to chime in here and say thank you for maintaining Yarn. I don’t use js often but yarn has always been my preferred tool when I do. Great to know that it has an awesome maintainer like you

FWIW, I am a very happy user of yarn, it always works so smoothly. Thank you!

Just switched from npm to yarn and I love it. Thanks for your work.

> how many people contact individuals who are behind Open Source projects just to say "Thank you."

Open-source developers occasionally express dislike of "thank you" messages. They may have written that software mainly to scratch their own itch, and dealing with messages that don't say anything but thanks takes precious time out of their day. Donating money, however, is usually more welcome.

That hasn't been my experience, somewhat the opposite since people who donate money sometimes turn weird and controlling (even over pretty small amounts).

One can send thanks along with "No response expected or required!" :)

My social media bubble is one that comparatively spends a lot of thought on maintainter/contributor appreciation, and I've literally never heard that complaint.

No open source maintainer is so busy that they don't have the time to respond to a ever so rare genuine thank you with a "Thanks, glad you appreciate it!".

I can kind of understand where they're coming from. I've had people create issues or leave comments on random commits for the sole purpose of expressing thanks, which can get annoying in a bigger project. Especially when there are a few hundred people watching the repository that now each receive multiple emails they aren't interested in. That said, I still do appreciate people taking the time to express thanks when opening an issue or when I have helped them with a problem.

Yes, there are obviously some ways to express gratitude that are preferable to others, but as long as the entitled/ungrateful/"you are _supposed_ to do things this way" comments outnumber the thankful ones, I won't start complaining about them.

I've written one small open source library, which I publicized a little bit back when I first released it. Like you said, I wrote it mostly to scratch my own itch, but it was really nice to see it get some use out in the wild, and I have gotten a few emails about it over the years. Personally, I really enjoy getting any kind of emails about it from people who are using it or who have questions. (To be fair, I've never gotten the murdery emails abou it)