In the Radicle ecosystem, quite a few people like the idea to "seed" repos that they want to support. It means that you download the repo, and also announce to other nodes that you have it available to share. Thus, you are not only incrementing some counter in a central database, but you are actually contributing to the replication of the project on the network.

The number of seeds then is a similar indicator as the number of stars.

Of course, you can also just keep a list of repository IDs.

Kinda like legacy git cloning, but then of course sharing back not just with a signal (e.g. star, likes, etc.), but also actual contribution via replication of said source code...I love it!