Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014 (2014)

big thread at the time:<p><i>Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7925135" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7925135</a> - June 2014 (76 comments)

Freshmeat, Slashdot, Everything2, Advogato, and more. Relics from a time when the Internet felt like a wild frontier.<p>The immense buzz when Mozilla open sourced Navigator&#x2F;Firefox. The crazy first day of the IPO of VA Software (+698% above initial price!!!)<p>Tweaking settings to get the best X11+Enlightenment speed possible, although I decided I preferred WindowMaker. Feeling like Open Source and Linux would take over the world (It did, really). Developers conferences at Apple to discuss this crazy upcoming Unix-based MacOS. (one of the presenters made a joke about how easy it would be to install apps, you&#x27;d just open a terminal and run &quot;&#x2F;bin&#x2F;install --etc&quot; and laughed at the horror on the faces of the assembled Mac evangelists)<p>I feel like an old hippie, trying to tell people what Woodstock was like and why it was special, only to see their confusion and lack of really <i>getting it</i>.<p>Not much of a point to this comment, just a big old nostalgia bomb early in my morning :)

Just a few days back, when an greybeard I followed on Twitter announced that he set up a TikTok account for his investing blog, I came to this sudden realisation: everything has become Pinterest. I joked to him about how he was an e-boy now.<p>By which I mean I&#x27;ve noticed that a large percentage of sites are converging to a a very similar aesthetic and demographic. Let me call this the &quot;Zoomer Influencer Aesthetic&quot;. Lots of buttons all over the place, popups to subscribe, garbage at the top, etc. You have to sign into many of these sites, of course, because all about harvesting those eyeballs, baby.<p>If you go back 10 years or so, it was a lot about content. You had something to say. Now it&#x27;s a case that YOU are the content. It&#x27;s all about you, how great your life is, how you&#x27;re an &quot;influencer&quot;, how you feel. When I first opened up TikTok, there was a category on unboxings, together with a bunch of beautiful boys and girls doing whatever vapid thing beautiful boys and girls do when they have nothing to teach or insights to impart.<p>We should probably blame YouTube. Ryan Higa, James Jackson and Felix Kjellberg possibly ignited a match. The young ladies have jumped on board, too. I dare say that most of them are doing 10X better than most man could do.<p>I do a bit of (mostly technical) blogging. I became fed up with Wordpress the other day, feeling it was too bloated. I had a hunt around for something that might be a suitable alternative. I had heard that Tumblr was picking up in popularity again, so I decided to give it a looksee to see if it was suitable. The answer was &quot;no&quot;. Posts aren&#x27;t dated (damn your teeth!), they seemed unsuitable for technical discussion, and they had that &quot;Pinterest&quot; feel to it. I quickly ruled it out. There were a few other sites I investigated, but figured they weren&#x27;t all that great. Too much navigation and baloney. I&#x27;m looking for something simple.<p>Anyway, that&#x27;s all for now. Now get off my lawn!

Freshmeat was really great. I was a consumer and producer of data. I remember well the announcement of the death of Freshmeat.<p>This is partly why I did Freshermeat [1]. I am operating an instance dedicated to security projects [2] where you can submit projects.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cedricbonhomme&#x2F;freshermeat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cedricbonhomme&#x2F;freshermeat</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open-source-security-software.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open-source-security-software.net</a>

I checked Freshmeat for updates every day for a number of years, both to find out about interesting source updates to my favorite software, as well as to discover new software.<p>I have strong memories of writing my first piece of fairly decently-used software (Ticketsmith) around 1999, then carefully hand-packaging the tarballs and crafting the FM entries. At one point, once I had learned a bit more about web servers, I moved the downloads from my web host to my own Linux-based Apache box running on a cable modem out of my apartment and watched the download logs with FM referrers in realtime. It was exhilarating.<p>One thing I clearly remember about FM was a very nice color scheme and font choice. It had a certain polish to it in what was often a land of Apache auto-gen directory entries full of tarballs.<p>Tangentially related: I worked briefly for VA Linux, as part of the first paid staff of Linux.com. I learned a lot of large-structure PHP site architecting that summer. My boss was OctoberX of Themes.org fame.

Freshmeat and Slashdot were the sites then to predict stock prices; by the news that appeared, you could simply know the stocks would go up; anything with ‘Linux’ made companies skyrocket or crash. I was in NL so I got up, read the news, placed my orders based on the news, which was simply filtering the word Linux and see which companies were positively or negatively named, and that was it. I remember that VA and Borland&#x2F;Inprise were just one big party. It was just printing money. This was why I cannot just hold stocks like investors say I should; trading made me a lot then as I was 100% it was going to crash. I am sure of this now again. But now I don’t have slashdot to predict both the up and down movements like clockwork.

Years ago, before browsers could parse arbitrary XML, I wrote a tiny little XML parser in JavaScript. A naive, non-recursive parser that was quite fast (and had a weird renaissance in the era of Web Workers, ending up in WebEx and a couple of other packages for some reason).<p>I started a Sourceforge and Freshmeat project and called it &quot;XML for &lt;SCRIPT&gt;&quot;, out of amusement.<p>And that is when I learned how many open source listings&#x2F;aggregator projects did not escape their output. It was difficult even to get the name changed.

There were others too. I liked Tucows Downloads too, it started even earlier, in 1993.

I loved Freshmeat from about 1998 to maybe 2002 or so and I remember checking it multiple times a day from my first dorm room at Georgia Tech. In those days, the &quot;.&#x2F;configure &amp;&amp; make &amp;&amp; make install&quot; was burned into my mind. As others have said, it really felt like the &quot;wild west.&quot; I remember needing to turn in a printed paper and looking frantically for an updated version of AbiWord that fixed a bug I was experiencing.<p>By the end of my time using it, it already felt superfluous. I moved from RedHat to Debian and apt was clearly a better system for managing the software on my system than the random mix of installing RPMs and grabbing source tarballs.

I miss Kuro5hin.org<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kuro5hin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kuro5hin</a>

I am not familiar with this project but wonder if the timing of it (1997) and the name indicates it was a fan nod to Diablo? The first boss in that game is such a memorable tagline I can actually still hear it today burned into my brain somewhere. &quot;Ahhh, fresh meat!&quot;

When people talk about &quot;the old web&quot; freshmeat (and its more visual equivalent, themes.org) is usually near the top of my mind. The ability to just see what everyone was up to without layers of product marketing (or, ugh, &quot;DevRel&quot;) on top, and what random (real, not capitalism-induced) itches people were scratching was a creative rush. The closest thing to a programmer&#x27;s equivalent of an art squat and junk shop.<p>Its absence is also one of the reasons I think the Linux desktop got so insular in the past decade. Freshmeat was a water cooler for people working on small components - here&#x27;s a text editor, here&#x27;s an ebook reader, here&#x27;s 50 music players - go build your own environment. Where do you go today to &quot;shop&quot; for free software? Usually, just your distro&#x27;s package repo.<p>The only comparable online experience I saw in the past decade was the high point of tumblr, albeit for a very different context.

I really liked Freshmeat!<p>These days, AlternativeTo is a pretty good… ehm, alternative.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alternativeto.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alternativeto.net&#x2F;</a>

I used to love browsing the site trying to find new stuff to try out on one of my Linux boxes. Good memories.

I didn&#x27;t know it was gone.<p>But seeing this makes me sentimental, I spent a lot of time there in my younger (and Linux) years.<p>I&#x27;m a Mac user now.

More nostalgia - reminds of sourceforge in particular and other 90-00s sites and products that were vacuumed up by various companies claiming to &quot;add value&quot; and then essentially destroying the thing.<p>Anything bought by IBM or Embarcadero seems to end up being abandonware too.<p>Not sure that&#x27;s happening so much these days, but that&#x27;s what happened to the 90&#x2F;00s web.

I still have a reminder of relying on Freshmeat, in a 1999 Web page at the MIT Media Lab:<p>&gt; <i>Probably the best directory of Linux software right now is Freshmeat (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freshmeat.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freshmeat.net&#x2F;</a>). You can use the full-text search or the category-based browsing (labeled &quot;appindex&quot;). Note that the category scheme is kinda odd.</i><p>I also pointed people at `rpmfind.net`. I&#x27;d find those random packages scary today (like I do xda-developers), but it was a more innocent time.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;lab-linux-1999&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;lab-linux-1999&#x2F;</a>

The AUR is probably the closest modern equivalent to Freshmeat. AIUI there are some projects trying yo bring something like that to other mainstream distros. Ubuntu-like distros have PPA&#x27;s, while Debian calls these &#x27;bikesheds&#x27;. But the idea is much the same.

1997? So I saw it for the first time when it was really fresh. I didn&#x27;t know that.

One of the huge advantages Freshmeat had was the Software Trove categorization feature. You could filter software to very specific requirements and find exactly the tools that fit your needs. During one of the needless web 2.0 rewrites which arose as part of the deck-chair rearranging near the end of the site, they got rid of that entirely and transitioned to a free-form tagging interface, which was comparatively useless. It was a real step backwards in data grooming and stripped the site of much of its value.<p>Unfortunately the freecode.club replacement service adopted the tagging mechanism instead of the Trove system.

Someone still runs <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freshcode.club" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freshcode.club</a> but it appears to be mostly automated.

I used to publish some OSS code at fm around 1997-2000.<p>Some years later when I was learning rails, I remember to read a book written by the author of fm: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;pub&#x2F;pr&#x2F;1985" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;pub&#x2F;pr&#x2F;1985</a><p>The rewrite of fm in rails was really good. I always used it as a reference for benchmarking when I was starting to work with RoR.

Freshmeat.net expanded my view of F&#x2F;OSS so much, at a time when I just didn&#x27;t know the scope. Great site and great project.

I can&#x27;t understand the sentence : &quot;Each night, a different company would try to outdo the others with a lavish party designed for frat boys that would fall feebly at the feet of a Dungeons &amp; Dragons crowd.&quot; can someone explain it ? What is the implied link between big parties and &#x27;Dungeons &amp; Dragons crowd&#x27; ?

Anyone have a copy of the really early freshmeat header image&#x2F;logo that was a closeup of a tattoo being applied to someone&#x27;s back, but mildly obscured because it was keyholed through the text? It was during a period where freshmeat had a dark&#x2F;black background&#x2F;theme.<p>Due to redirects, it seems like archive.org doesn&#x27;t have it.

The amount of traffic my little Perl app got from Freshmeat was astounding. Paid my way through college.

There&#x27;s an instance still running, but frozen in time at the 2014 state here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freshmeat.sourceforge.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freshmeat.sourceforge.net&#x2F;</a><p>&quot;Content may be stale&quot; indeed (from the header)...

I use to use Freshmeat all the time in the 90s and early 2000s. I think it came back but was renamed due to its name not being &quot;good&quot;. I miss those early Linux Days, lots was happening.<p>Now, with corporations controlling the kernel, Linux is rather boring.

Once sf.net became a super obnoxious piece with shady ads. It was an incredibly fast exodus.

I literally have been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt. There used to be some great Linux t-shirts back in the day but, that bright orange Freshmeat shirt is one I wish I never tossed. I can&#x27;t even find a pic on Google Images.

thanks for the nostalgia. freshmeat and slashdot are still in my muscle memory, i can type the adresses blindly. Still consuming slashdot, it has aged somehow better then digg or reddit (considering the atrocious layout vs. old.reddit.com)

That name! Associations ad libitum with meathooks and carcasses and bloodstained butchers. Yes, I actually believe this is the reason I never went there. And same goes, to a lesser extent, for Slashdot.

I remember visiting freshman daily looking for new apps to install on my RH 5.2 box. This is how I learned about apache, mysql and everything else on between. Still remember fondly my early days.

I love how they still have the categories for software from Planning&#x2F;Pre-Alpha to Mature. At some point I got almost all Desktop apps from there

I did one of the first banners (crowdsurfing logo) for Freshmeat back when keeping up with dependency management was exciting.

I gave a talk on the use of freeware for non-profits - I titled it tongue in cheek Freshmeat for Vegetarians.

Where do people go now for the sort of info Freshmeat used to provide?

Damn, this just kicked my nostalgia centers into high gear.

freshmeat and slashdot are both still burned in my finger’s muscle memory when I’m at a url bar. Like typing ls at a shell prompt.