The Viral Fork

Your SolarPunk guide. 70% of what you paid goes to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund (EIN 93-1057665).

The name is a lie and I'm keeping it

You can't engineer a viral fork. You can engineer a repo worth forking when someone finds it. Less exciting, more useful.

What gets forked

Not the impressive thing — the usable thing. A repo with 500 engines and no README gets zero forks. One script that solves one annoying problem, with the output shown in the first screen, gets forked every time.

The five things, in order of worth

1. The first screen of your README shows what it produces — someone decides in four seconds. 2. One command to run it (three lines max). 3. It has to run in a fresh container today with no keys. 4. Scope small enough that a person believes they could modify it. 5. Be findable at all — no quality survives a 404.

Measure clone-to-run, not stars

A star is a bookmark. A fork is someone putting your code on their machine. Test monthly that your own repo runs clean in a fresh container.