Belluxx/Aleph · Belluxx

Draw a box and download the Colosseum's 3D model to your computer: how an open-source library with 39 followers went from 32 to 821 stars on a single reel

What it is An open-source Python tool: draw a box on a map and it downloads the buildings, terrain, satellite imagery, street-level photos, and Google Earth 3D models inside it to your machine. It can also fetch data by place name for AI agents.

Why it took off A demo of drawing a box and getting the Colosseum's 3D model is understood in ten seconds, and the copy says "no API key" and "for your LLM". Accounts that feature new GitHub repos on Instagram and TikTok turned it into a video, and then localized repost accounts in other languages carried it further.

BHow you could follow Copy the playbook, not the topic: build a tool that gives agents a new sense (say, a compliant version using only open data, or an MCP server), put a 10-second eye-catching GIF and a one-line hook on the first screen of the README, and message the GitHub-roundup accounts in each language directly.

Grade B: the playbook of "a demo that's easy to film + a one-line hook + riding the agent hype + pitching roundup accounts" is clear, cheap, and no one has copied it yet. But older libraries on the same theme have more stars, Aleph itself depends on an undocumented Google endpoint so its ceiling is a few hundred to a thousand stars, and whether a roundup account picks you up is a gamble. Spreading in small circles

Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-09-19 · 841 stars · 7 days +264: GitHub · stars
Data 2026-10-09 → 2026-11-08 (31 days, 27 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one

Aleph is a small Python tool written solo by Italian developer Pietro Bellodi: draw a box on a map, and the buildings, terrain, satellite imagery, street-level photos, and Google Earth 3D models inside it are downloaded locally, with no API key. Its features taken separately have been in several older libraries for a long time, and those libraries have more stars. It took off because the demo is so easy to film, and accounts on Instagram and TikTok that specialize in featuring new GitHub repos picked it up. Others can use the same playbook, but the topic itself leaves little room for you.

A video with 40k views

As of Oct 2026, 19, Belluxx/Aleph had 32 stars and hadn't been touched in a month. The author had 39 followers on GitHub, and their biggest previous repo had 78 stars. They had posted Show HN twice on Hacker News, and each got only 1 points.

On Oct 21, an Instagram account called @githubsignals posted a reel, and the next day the same video went up on TikTok. The visuals were basically the GIF at the top of the README: a dashboard framing the Roman Colosseum, then cutting to a 3D mesh of the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, and the Matterhorn. The caption read:

"You can download a 3D model of a landmark with textures, plus high-res satellite imagery and street-level photos, without any API key."

到 11 月 6 日,这条 TikTok 有 40,877 次播放、1,894 个赞、2,235 次收藏、354 次分享。收藏比赞还多,说明看的人是把它存起来、打算以后用。10 月 22 日一个博客记下它是 218 星,写的是「@githubsignals 那条爆款 reel 背后的工具」;到 10 月 24 日,387 星。

The comments section has only 5 comments, and one of them says: "I'm a geographer and GIS engineer, this has existed for ages, everyone does this all the time." That isn't wrong, and I'll get to it below.

What it actually is

The first line of the README reads "Download a piece of the world for you (or your LLM)". It does two things:

Open a local web dashboard, draw a rectangle or polygon, and all five data layers download at once: OpenStreetMap buildings, terrain elevation, high-res satellite imagery, Google Street View photos, and a textured 3D model you can rotate in the browser when it's done.
The command line fetches single-point data by place name or coordinates, e.g. alephgeo streetview --place "Colosseum, Rome", so agents can call it.

It depends only on Pillow, numpy and truststore. MIT license, no official website, no fees. The README itself says Street View, satellite imagery and 3D models belong to Google, that "downloading them violates Google's terms", and that it uses undocumented endpoints that "may stop working or get rate-limited at any time".

Where the stars came from

Timeline	What happened	Stars (GitHub)
10-05 / 10-06	Shipped v0.2.0 with a web dashboard and 3D viewing, then added polygon selection	30+
Around 10-20	The author posted "Aleph now supports 3D models of entire cities" in the Reddit subreddit r/TopologyAI	32
10-21 / 10-22	@githubsignals posted a reel on IG and TikTok; the same day the Arabic TikTok account @lokopic reposted it, 27,154 views	218(10-22)
10-24	India's IG account @pravanjan.builds ran a roundup	387
10-30 ~ 11-01	The Philippine Facebook account Pinoyfreecoder posted a video with 19k views; gittrend.io posted on IG, TikTok and X with "comment aleph and I'll DM you the link"; a Reddit GitHub roundup post included it	505 → 577
11-02 / 11-03	A second peak: +76 and +108 in a single day	653 → 761
11-06	Still gaining twenty or thirty a day	821,74 forks

The first wave came from @githubsignals, and the timing lines up exactly. The second wave was dozens of repost accounts in different languages passing it along. Which single post contributed the most is impossible to tell from outside.

The channels that didn't work are worth looking at too: there's no Hacker News post about this library; on X there's been one post in the last 30 days, with 38 views; and repos under 60 days old can't get onto GitHub Trending. In other words, none of the places developers normally watch picked it up, and nearly all of the 821 stars came from short videos.

The author did few things, but each one landed: on the day it blew up, they added a disclaimer about Google's terms to the README; over the next few days they fixed a macOS certificate error and renamed the package to alephgeo so newcomers could install it; then they opened PRs to the awesome-osint and Awesome-Geospatial lists, stating "I am the author", to catch the long-tail search traffic.

Why this one got picked

GitHub roundup accounts look for new repos to make videos about every day. They pick things that can be understood within 10 seconds and produce a visually clear result. Aleph hit all three:

Easy to demo. Draw a box and a Colosseum appears. Anyone can understand that picture without knowing GIS. The repost accounts basically copied the README's animated GIF.
"No API key." To get Google's 3D cities through the proper route, you open a Google Cloud account and pay per use. "You don't need any key at all" is the line every repost quoted.
"For your LLM." Technically it's just a data downloader, but with that label it can ride the #llm and #aitools tags and get into the AI tools content pool. At the same time, Oldcircle/geo-sleuth (which uses satellite imagery and Street View to work out where a photo was taken) went from 1,400 to 6,100 stars in a month. "Agents plus real-world geo data" is the hot topic right now.

Who else is doing the same thing

What the geographer meant by "it's been around forever" is this:

Project	Stars	Compared with Aleph
eliemichel/MapsModelsImporter	2,820	Capture browser frames with RenderDoc and import Google Maps 3D into Blender. The steps are tedious and it only does 3D.
retroplasma/earth-reverse-engineering	2,332	A research script that reverse-engineers Google Earth 3D. It has no interface and no other data layers.
vvoovv/blosm	2,149	A Blender add-on that imports Google 3D, OSM and terrain. It's aimed at 3D artists, requires a key, and has a paid version.
robolyst/streetview, sk-zk/streetlevel and similar	200~550	Street View download only
gaopengbin/geo-downloader	436	A general GIS download desktop app aimed at the Chinese-speaking market. It doesn't do Street View.
cablate/mcp-google-map, baidu-maps/mcp	400~500	Map MCPs for agents. They return text only (places, routes), not images or 3D.
Oldcircle/geo-sleuth	6,129	Adjacent topic: agents guessing a photo's location from imagery, also hugely popular during the same period

Every one of these capabilities has been built before, and the older repos have two to three times Aleph's stars. Aleph's only new move is packaging five layers into one box, downloading everything in one click, requiring no key, and adding the "for your LLM" label. Nobody has redone it yet. Any same-name repos you find are forks and mirrors.

Its weak spots

It rests on Google's undocumented endpoints. "No key needed" is its biggest selling point and also its biggest risk. If the endpoints change, get blocked, or it receives a DMCA notice, the core feature is gone.
Stars mostly mean bookmarks, not use. On TikTok there are more saves than likes, and only 1 issues are open. You can't tell how many people are actually using it.
Growth depends on other people posting videos. The author's own channels (Reddit subreddits, awesome lists) are small. If the roundup accounts stop posting, the curve will flatten.

If it were you

The verdict: The playbook is worth copying, but not the topic. An unknown author earned 800 stars in a month by combining "easy-to-demo + one hook line + riding the agent wave", and that formula works for other topics too. But "scraping Google's data" as a specific direction has many existing repos and high legal risk. Building a copy of the same thing will be hard to beat it.

Who it suits: Developers who already have a capability and can produce a visually striking result, such as tools that feed data, images, 3D, or audio/video to agents, and who are willing to spend a day polishing the README's first screen.

Who it doesn't suit: People building pure backend or pure text tools, or anything whose demo can't be made visual. Anyone hoping to make money from this kind of open-source tool will generally not.

How to do it:

Pick a topic that gives agents a "new sense", with a compliant, free data source. For example, rebuild the "draw a box and download everything" idea using only open data (OSM, Sentinel satellite imagery, Mapillary Street View, open terrain). That directly fixes Aleph's terms-violation problem. Or package it as an MCP server so agents in Claude or Cursor can call it directly, which is something Aleph hasn't done.
Put an animated GIF under 10 seconds at the top of the README. Simple input, striking output, and the first sentence should be the hook ("no key", "one command").
It should install and run right away. The fewer dependencies the better, and test the install yourself on both macOS and Windows first.

How to get users: Contact the GitHub roundup accounts on IG and TikTok directly (githubsignals, gittrend.io and similar, in English, Arabic, Hindi, and Filipino). Send the animated GIF and a one-line pitch by DM, since they're always short on material. Post on Reddit's r/coolgithubprojects and the relevant specialist subreddits yourself, and open PRs to the matching awesome lists. You can post on HN and X, but don't expect much.

How early you need to be: The "agents + real-world data" wave is still going. geo-sleuth and Aleph both took off after September. My estimate (an inference) is that the window is a few months, not years, so aim to ship before the end of this year.

Signs you've misread it: Two weeks after your README GIF goes out, none of the roundup accounts you DM'd repost it, and your stars stay in the double digits. That would mean the demo isn't visual enough, or the topic's heat has already passed. Aleph's own stars stopped growing in mid-November, which also shows this wave is fading faster than expected.

GitHub repo ↗

Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report

Competitors

Name	Where	Launched	Scale	How it differs from this one
vvoovv/blosm	Open source	2014	2,149 stars, with a paid version	A Blender add-on that imports Google 3D cities, OSM and terrain. Aimed at 3D artists, requires installing Blender and a key. No Street View, no LLM/CLI positioning.
eliemichel/MapsModelsImporter	Open source	2019	2,820 stars	Uses RenderDoc to capture frames and import Google Maps 3D. The workflow is tedious and it only does 3D.
retroplasma/earth-reverse-engineering	Open source	2019	2,332 stars	A research script that reverse-engineers Google Earth 3D. Mesh only, with no interface and no other data layers.
robolyst/streetview / sk-zk/streetlevel / ZenSVI	Open source	2016/2022/2023	550/247/216 stars	Street View download and analysis only, a single data source
gaopengbin/geo-downloader (GeoD)	Open source	2025-12	436 stars	A general GIS data download desktop app aimed at GIS users. It doesn't do Street View and has no agent positioning.
Google Maps Platform(Photorealistic 3D Tiles / Street View / Aerial API)	Big-company features	From ¥2023	Official	Compliant, but it requires an API key and billing, and there's no all-in-one box-and-download tool. Aleph skips it and scrapes undocumented endpoints directly.
Map MCPs such as cablate/mcp-google-map and baidu-maps/mcp	Open source	2025	489/447 stars	Give agents text-only place, route and geocoding results, with no images or 3D
Oldcircle/geo-sleuth	Open source	2026-09-18	6,129 stars, +7 in 1,628 days	Adjacent: agents using geo data to infer where a photo was taken. It's also huge right now, showing that the "agents + real geo data" topic is hot.
Teddy563/realworldmc	Open source	2026-10-09	225 stars	Pulls Google 3D and Street View to rebuild cities inside Minecraft. Aimed at players.

Where users come from

Verified Instagram/TikTok roundup account @githubsignals: IG reel 10-21; TikTok 10-22,40,875 views, 1,894 likes, 2,235 saves (TikHub); nathanputnam.com 10-22 wrote "218★, the tool behind @githubsignals' viral reel"
Verified Cross-language repost chain (TikTok/IG/Facebook): @lokopic Arabic TikTok 10-22 27k views; @pravanjan.builds IG 10-24; Pinoyfreecoder FB video 19k views; gittrend.io IG/TikTok/X 10-31–11-01 comments swapping for links; @ikramrana.ai IG 11-05
Inferred Author's own Reddit posts: first-person post by the author in r/TopologyAI, "Aleph now supports 3D models of entire cities, scraped from Google Earth", around 10-20; plus Reddit roundup posts in r/coolgithubprojects and r/BestGitHubRepos, around 11-01 (posters and vote counts unverified)
Verified awesome-list PRs: the author opened PRs to jivoi/awesome-osint #1372 and sacridini/Awesome-Geospatial #318, disclosing "I'm the author"
Verified auto blogs / aggregator sites: themenonlab.blog, nathanputnam.com (10-22), LinkedIn (10-23), opensourcealternatives.to, toknow.ai (11-03), gitdiagram; all followed after the spike started
Verified HN / X / trending: the hackernews database and HN Algolia have no posts; X has only one gittrend_io post with 38 views in the last 30 days; repos under 60 days old don't make trending

Why Aleph (Belluxx/Aleph) took off

Research date 2026-11-06. Channel: GitHub. Data from our github database (repo_profile / repo_day), the hackernews database, the x tool's live search, the GitHub API, TikHub (TikTok), and web pages fetched via Jina / Exa / Brave.

One line

Aleph is an MIT-licensed Python tool. Draw a box or polygon on a map and it downloads everything inside to your machine: OSM buildings, terrain elevation, high-res satellite imagery, Google Street View photos, and textured Google Earth 3D models. It also has a CLI for fetching single-point data by place name or coordinates, built for LLMs and agents. No API key needed; the only dependencies are Pillow, numpy, and truststore. The main driver was distribution: a repo from an Italian solo developer (39 followers) was turned into a reel by @githubsignals, a "new GitHub repos" account on Instagram and TikTok, on 10-21/22. That one reel took stars from 32 to a couple hundred. Dozens of copycat accounts followed (an Arabic TikTok, an Indian IG account, a Filipino Facebook page, gittrend.io), causing a second wave. The product got picked up because its demo is made for short video: draw a box and get a 3D model of the Colosseum or the Eiffel Tower, plus "no API key," and the "for your LLM" framing rode the agent wave. HN and X barely participated.

Key facts

Repo created 2026-09-19 by Pietro Bellodi (GitHub Belluxx, Italy, 39 followers, personal site bellux.dev). The author's earlier repos were small: Java2Smali at 78 stars, LocalAIME at 39 stars, Perplex at 19 stars (GitHub API). They had posted Show HN twice before, each scoring only 1 points (HN Algolia).
As of 11-06:821 stars (live from the GitHub API 829), 74 forks, a fork-to-star ratio of about 9%. Over 7 days: +316; single-day peak 11-03 +108 (github repo).
Daily star counts (github database repo_day): 10-13~10-19 flat at 32 → 10-24 387 (no observations between 10-20~23; Nathan Putnam's blog records 10-22 at 218 stars) → 10-25 422 → 10-27 465 → 10-30 505 → 10-31 558 → 11-01 577 → 11-02 653 (+76) → 11-03 761 (+108) → 11-04 780 → 11-05 801 → 11-06 821.
Product cadence (commit history): 10-05 released v0.2.0, adding a web dashboard, 3D viewing, and parallel downloads; 10-06 added polygon selection (issue #2 was showing 31 stars at the time); 10-22, the day it blew up, added a "violates Google's terms" disclaimer and a Google notice in the dashboard; 10-25~27 fixed macOS certificate issues and renamed the package to alephgeo; 11-01 merged the first external PR. No paid tier, no website.

Where users come from (growth levers)

@githubsignals 的 reel(第一波主因,已确认):Instagram reel 10-21 发出(instagram.com/reel/DeyBZyUDLg9),TikTok 同款 10-22 03:30 UTC 发出(@github.signals,视频 7699329369205951765),到现在 40,875 播放、1,894 赞、2,235 收藏、354 分享(TikHub)。收藏比赞还多,说明观众是存下来以后用的。文案用的是 README 里的演示,结尾挂了 github.com/belluxx/aleph。Nathan Putnam 10-22 的博客原话是「218★ … The tool behind @githubsignals' viral reel」(nathanputnam.com/blog/belluxx/aleph)。时间线对得上:10-19 还是 32 星,10-22 到 218,10-24 到 387。
Cross-language copycat relay (confirmed):
- @lokopic, Arabic (Algeria) TikTok, 10-22:27,154 views, 1,333 likes (TikHub).
- @pravanjan.builds, Instagram, 10-24, posting roundups in the format "Owner/Org: Belluxx (Aleph) / Use Case …".
- Pinoyfreecoder, Facebook video, about 10-30: 19K views, 109 reactions, "GitHub link is in the comments."
- gittrend.io, IG / TikTok 10-31, X 11-01: uses the hook "Comment 'aleph' and I'll DM you the repo link." The TikTok has only 267 views; the X post has 38 views (x live).
- @ikramrana.ai, Instagram, 11-05, also DMs the link to anyone who comments "ALEPH."
- Bing / Google indexing also picks up r/coolgithubprojects and r/BestGitHubRepos posts titled "Aleph: give your LLM satellite imagery, 3D buildings…", about 11-01 (Reddit blocked scraping, so the posters and vote counts are unverified).
- The second peak, 11-02~03 (+76, +108), lines up in time with this batch of secondary spread: Facebook, gittrend, and the Reddit roundup posts. Which one contributed most is unverified.
The author posted on Reddit (confirmed to exist, reach unverified): a post on r/TopologyAI by the author, "Aleph now supports 3D models of entire cities, scraped from Google Earth," written in the first person ("I've been working on Aleph"), posted about two weeks before 10-20, with commenters asking how to use it (Brave summary). r/TopologyAI is a small subreddit, and it may also have been cross-posted elsewhere; unverified.
Author opened PRs to awesome lists (confirmed): jivoi/awesome-osint #1372 and sacridini/Awesome-Geospatial #318, both PRs stating "Disclosure: I'm the author." This is an entry point into long-tail SEO and the OSINT community; how much traffic it brought is unverified.
Auto blogs / aggregator sites (confirmed, follow-on): themenonlab.blog (10-22), nathanputnam.com (10-22), a LinkedIn personal post (10-23), gitdiagram.com, opensourcealternatives.to (about 11-01), toknow.ai (11-03). Most of these are automated or semi-automated content that tracks GitHub star growth; they are a consequence of the spike, not its cause.
Channels that didn't participate: there are no HN posts for this repo (checked both the hackernews database and HN Algolia). On X, the only post is one from gittrend_io with 38 views (x live, last 30 days). Trending doesn't include repos under 60 days old, so it never charted either (the github database notes spell out this rule). No ads or paid promotion found.

Where the money comes from: nowhere. MIT-licensed, with no website, sponsor button, or paid tier. The author's return is a portfolio and reputation. There's also a risk: the 3D models, street view, and satellite imagery are scraped from Google's undocumented endpoints, and the README itself says "Downloading them goes against Google's terms." That makes the repo hard to monetize and exposes it to endpoint blocking or DMCA takedowns.

Competitors

Name	Where	Launched	Scale	How Aleph differs
vvoovv/blosm(Blosm)	Open source / Blender add-on (with a paid pro version)	2014	2,149 stars	Imports Google 3D cities, OSM, and terrain into Blender, aimed at 3D artists. Requires Blender, and using Google 3D needs an API key. No street view, and no LLM / CLI positioning.
eliemichel/MapsModelsImporter	Open source / Blender add-on	2019	2,820 stars	Captures browser frames with RenderDoc to export Google Maps 3D. The workflow is cumbersome and only covers 3D.
retroplasma/earth-reverse-engineering	Open source	2019	2,332 stars	A research script that reverse-engineers Google Earth 3D. It only downloads meshes, with no UI and no other data layers.
robolyst/streetview, sk-zk/streetlevel, koito19960406/ZenSVI	Open source Python libraries	2016 / 2022 / 2023	550 / 247 / 216 stars	Street view panorama download / analysis only, a single data source.
gaopengbin/geo-downloader(GeoD)	Open source desktop app (Rust)	2025-12	436 stars	A general GIS data downloader (OSM / XYZ / GeoTIFF / 3D Tiles) for GIS users in the Chinese-speaking community. No street view, and no agent positioning.
opengeos/leafmap, segment-geospatial, and others	Open source Jupyter ecosystem	From ¥2021	leafmap at 3,797 stars	Professional GIS analysis toolchains. High barrier to entry, aimed at researchers.
Google Maps Platform (Photorealistic 3D Tiles from the Map Tiles API, Street View Static, Aerial)	Big-company features	From ¥2023	Official	Compliant and stable, but requires an API key and billing, and there's no integrated "draw a box, download everything" tool. Aleph effectively sidesteps it.
cablate/mcp-google-map, baidu-maps/mcp, tomtom-maps-mcp	Open source MCP servers	2025	489 / 447 / 59 stars	Place search, routing, and geocoding for agents, via text-based APIs. No imagery or 3D.
Oldcircle/geo-sleuth	Open source agent skill	2026-09-18	6,129 stars, +7 in 1,628 days	Adjacent, not a direct competitor: it infers where a photo was taken from OSM, elevation, satellite, and street view data. It was hot during the same period, which shows "agents + real-world geodata" is a live topic, and Aleph rode that wave.
Teddy563/realworldmc	Open source Minecraft mod	2026-10-09	225 stars	Also pulls Google 3D and street view, to recreate cities inside Minecraft. Aimed at players.
Mapscaping web tools (elevation download, 3D building export)	Web	2026	Not verified	Online mini-tools with a single data layer.

Bottom line: individual capabilities (street view download, Google 3D extraction, OSM / terrain download) were already built by others, and the older repos have more stars than Aleph. Aleph is the first to package these five layers into "one box, download everything, no key" and label it "for LLMs".

Differentiation, and whether it's a manufactured ranking

All-in-one + no key + zero dependencies: no Google Cloud account, no Blender, RenderDoc, or GDAL to install. Run pip install ., open the dashboard, and draw a box. The pitch the blog and LinkedIn posts keep repeating is exactly this: "Two dependencies: Pillow and numpy" and "No API keys."
Strong visuals: the README's demo.webp is the Colosseum grabbing Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House and the Matterhorn in a 3D grid. Repost accounts ran it almost unchanged as a reel. That's the direct reason it got picked up by short-video accounts, meaning the differentiation turned into distribution through being easy to show off.
The "for your LLM" positioning: technically it's still mainly a data downloader, but the framing lets it into the AI tools content pool (#llm #aitools #claudecode tags). Calling it just a "GIS downloader" would have reached far fewer people. geo-sleuth's concurrent rise (from 1.4k to 6.1k in October) shows the topic was hot at the time.
So the differentiation is why it took off, but the mechanism was "good demo → picked up by repost accounts," not developer word of mouth or HN discussion. There's a cost to note too: "no key needed" essentially means scraping Google's undocumented endpoints. That same fact both powers the pitch and is the biggest risk.

Visibility and copycats

Visibility: circulating in small circles. Main exposure came from a few short-video roundup accounts (the largest TikTok post had 41k views, the FB one 19k), plus several auto-blogs. It never hit HN, almost nobody mentioned it on X, and there was no press or major-creator coverage and no public revenue.
Copycats: none. The porom004/Aleph and HARDOX-design/Aleph results were just forks and mirrors, with no renamed rebuilds.

What others can borrow

New-GitHub-repo roundup accounts are a ready free distribution channel: on IG and TikTok, a group of accounts (githubsignals, gittrend.io, pravanjan.builds, ikramrana.ai, with versions in multiple languages) hunts for new repos daily to make reels. The animated GIF at the top of the README, which is understandable in 10 seconds with a visually obvious result (frame a region → 3D landmarks), was essentially handing them ready-made material.
Relabeling an existing capability as "senses for your LLM / agent" got it into the AI tools content pool and multiplied the audience by an order of magnitude.
"No key, zero config" was itself a sharing hook. The author also submitted PRs to lists like awesome-osint and Awesome-Geospatial, which caught the long tail.
On the day it blew up, the author added a disclaimer and fixed install issues (macOS certificates, package name), catching the incoming traffic.

Still unclear

10-20~23 was not tracked in our database for these days, so it's unclear how much of the first wave came from reels versus the author's Reddit post. The exact date and upvotes of the r/TopologyAI post, and whether it was also cross-posted to r/gis or r/LocalLLaMA, are unverified (Reddit blocked scraping).
The specific source of the second peak in 11-02~03 (FB, a Reddit roundup post, gittrend, or some reel we didn't find) is unverified.
Actual usage is unknown: stars are mostly bookmarks, and reels getting more saves than likes points the same way.
Whether Google will block the endpoints or issue a DMCA takedown is unknown, and that determines how long it lasts.

This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.