[HN Gopher] Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014 (2014)
___________________________________________________________________
Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014 (2014)
Author : yankcrime
Score : 185 points
Date : 2022-03-07 10:43 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jeffcovey.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (jeffcovey.net)
| nobleach wrote:
| 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't even find a pic on Google Images.
| morelisp wrote:
| When people talk about "the old web" 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, "DevRel") on top, and what
| random (real, not capitalism-induced) itches people were
| scratching was a creative rush. The closest thing to a
| programmer's equivalent of an art squat and junk shop.
|
| 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's a text editor,
| here's an ebook reader, here's 50 music players - go build your
| own environment. Where do you go today to "shop" for free
| software? Usually, just your distro's package repo.
|
| The only comparable online experience I saw in the past decade
| was the high point of tumblr, albeit for a very different
| context.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| 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/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.
| guruz wrote:
| I didn't know it was gone.
|
| But seeing this makes me sentimental, I spent a lot of time there
| in my younger (and Linux) years.
|
| I'm a Mac user now.
| pelasaco wrote:
| I used to publish some OSS code at fm around 1997-2000.
|
| Some years later when I was learning rails, I remember to read a
| book written by the author of fm:
| https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1985
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| pvg wrote:
| big thread at the time:
|
| _Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925135 - June 2014 (76
| comments)
| piokoch wrote:
| There were others too. I liked Tucows Downloads too, it started
| even earlier, in 1993.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Freshmeat was FLOSS specific I think.
| morelisp wrote:
| Even by 1997, Tucows and the recent CNET Download.com were
| covered in crap. It's the same problem e.g. AlternativeTo has
| today. There's no sense of a human in the loop at any stage,
| even though back then there must have been. Tucows was where
| you went to find the printer driver you'd lost the original
| disks for, not (to pick an absolutely random freshmeat.net from
| page from 2002) "a fully-featured role playing suite of
| applications that allow people to meet and play a classic "pen-
| and-paper" game across the internet" or a tool "adding
| functionality and ease-of-use to RPM, by allowing a user to
| search through a collection of RPMs on various FTP servers
| (given in a configuration file), and download and install all
| in one action."
| timbit42 wrote:
| Major Geeks replaced them for me.
| morelisp wrote:
| Well the first thing I see is two banner ads, one of them
| being a VPN. The next thing I see is three "system
| optimizers", two of which I know are garbage.
|
| I guess that's not too far from late Download.com energy,
| but I'd caution you about using it further.
| jcims wrote:
| Trumpet Winsock days
| kappuchino wrote:
| 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)
| crb3 wrote:
| Old.reddit.com still works -- just use it. So far they're smart
| enough to realize that some folks _like_ an information-dense
| display in their browser, rather than a fluffy echo of Yahoo 's
| purple plague.
|
| I watch slashdot via http://alterslash.org, and occasionally (
| _very_ occasionally) drop into the main site to add a comment.
| Are they still adding hot grits to Natalie Portman? Watching
| just the top comments on AlterSlash, I don 't have to care.
| cedricbonhomme wrote:
| Freshmeat was really great. I was a consumer and producer of
| data. I remember well the announcement of the death of Freshmeat.
|
| This is partly why I did Freshermeat [1]. I am operating an
| instance dedicated to security projects [2] where you can submit
| projects.
|
| [1] https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/freshermeat [2]
| https://open-source-security-software.net
| rkeene2 wrote:
| The instance I use is called freshcode [0]
|
| [0] https://freshcode.club/
| readingnews wrote:
| Like yourself I was both a consumer and producer on Freshmeat.
|
| I recall when it closed, I think RMS or ESR (kinda fuzzy now)
| asked for people to help build a replacement.
|
| Personally, it is a real loss, not in a nostalgia sort of way,
| but in a discovery way. Search engines, searching github, heck
| just github, are no substitute for the cool software we found
| on Freshmeat. It was a way for projects to not only become
| visible, but for you to stumble upon them (as other comments
| have already noted). With some frequency, I wonder why no one
| has come up with a replacement. Sourceforge has had its ups and
| downs, but the front page of SourceForge compared to
| FreshMeat.net is like comparing a modern news conglomerate to
| Hacker News.
| ms4720 wrote:
| I used to do the same thing using FreeBSD's ports collection
| back then. I amazed my coworkers with my skills at finding
| things.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I love how they still have the categories for software from
| Planning/Pre-Alpha to Mature. At some point I got almost all
| Desktop apps from there
| pabs3 wrote:
| Where do people go now for the sort of info Freshmeat used to
| provide?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Does the need for that even exist today? It seems like
| everything has drifted to web and continuous deployment, the
| very concept of desktop applications and releases has
| disappeared.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Not quite the same, but I follow a bunch of people on github,
| and see what they star/fork. That exposes me to new software.
| choffman wrote:
| I sometimes peruse the Daily/Weekly/Monthly trending report on
| Github: https://github.com/trending?since=daily
| timbit42 wrote:
| Major Geeks maybe.
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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
| "good". I miss those early Linux Days, lots was happening.
|
| Now, with corporations controlling the kernel, Linux is rather
| boring.
| vidarh wrote:
| It was renamed to Freecode, you're right (EDIT: indeed I found
| I complained about the renaming being a sign it was all over in
| the HN thread about Freshmeat closing back in 2014...)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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's,
| while Debian calls these 'bikesheds'. But the idea is much the
| same.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Freshmeat.net expanded my view of F/OSS so much, at a time when I
| just didn't know the scope. Great site and great project.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| 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).
|
| I started a Sourceforge and Freshmeat project and called it "XML
| for <SCRIPT>", out of amusement.
|
| And that is when I learned how many open source
| listings/aggregator projects did not escape their output. It was
| difficult even to get the name changed.
| samstave wrote:
| OH man!
|
| I have a cringe-worthy XML story from ~1998.
|
| I was IT manager for a software fulfillment and manufacturing
| company in redwood city, ca. Our biggest client was SUN
| Microsystems.
|
| We manufactured the actual physical product for SUN OS Solaris,
| checkpoint FW, among things like games such as Everquest,
| TurboTax etc... If you bought any of these, we made the CDs,
| Boxes, Manuals, etc and handled drop-ship for orders done
| online via an EDI file that was FTP'd to our Linux FTP servers
| we built in house with the crew who would later found
| LinuxCare.
|
| So, SUN wanted to have a big meeting on changing the EDI
| process from the FTP PUT of a flat text-file that we then
| needed to parse (which was a pain as our devs were constantly
| fiddling bits in order to make the EDI flatfile import into our
| manifest system on AS/400 went cleanly.
|
| SUN wanted us to adopt this new EDI process based on their
| newly adopted plan for XML... I think this may have actually
| been the first meeting SUN had with any vendor to start XML
| adoption.
|
| We didnt have any experience, clearly with XML, and SUN was
| doing a poor job in this meeting explaining why they wanted to
| use it.
|
| I was ~22 years old or so, and I said the following cringe-
| worthy comment to the head of the relationship with SUN in
| front of the entire exec staff at my company:
|
| SUN: So we want to eliminate the flat-file EDI format we have
| because of all our data issues _(many late night hours each
| week fixing batch jobs on the AS /400 by many people on my
| team)_
|
| ME: "So, just so I understand, we are going to drop the crappy
| way your sending us data, and you want us to adopt this new
| thing, XML, which we haven't used yet - and you think this will
| resolve the data issues we have with the EDI process?"
|
| ENTIRE C-SUITE AT MY COMPANY: *WAVING ARMS WILDLY* trying to
| get me to STFU mid sentence for calling SUN's EDI processes
| "CRAPPY"
|
| I'll never forget that meeting. I Still cringe over that
| meeting to this day, however in a cmical way - as I realize I
| was 22 years old and that meeting was the first (many) had ever
| heard of XML.
|
| ---
|
| Fun Fact; the folks that setup our FTP EDI process with linux,
| cronjobs for import and supporting our Linux boxes were Dave
| Sifry, Chris DiBonna and the others that founded LinuxCare.
|
| Fun other fact ; After having these consultants for some time,
| I went to Dave Sifry, and I said to him "If I were you, I would
| start a company that specifically offers linux support
| contracts.
|
| A ~month later Dave Sifry sat me down and said "Guess what I am
| doing!? We created a company called LinuxCare!"
|
| We spoke briefly about me joining them, but I wasn't a good fit
| for helping them at this point... just a good catalyst that
| solidified what they were already thinking about.
| interfixus wrote:
| 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.
| JadeNB wrote:
| The slash in Slashdot is just / as in /. --nothing violent!
| antiframe wrote:
| More cutely, the slash in Shashdot is so that when you
| verbally communicate the URL to someone, it sounds like
| "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash dot dot oh are gee".
| crb3 wrote:
| I've read that Malda wished a 'dot' TLD was available back
| then so it could be 'aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash
| slash dot dot dot'.
| bhaak wrote:
| 1997? So I saw it for the first time when it was really fresh. I
| didn't know that.
| stonogo wrote:
| 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.
|
| Unfortunately the freecode.club replacement service adopted the
| tagging mechanism instead of the Trove system.
| booleanbetrayal wrote:
| I did one of the first banners (crowdsurfing logo) for Freshmeat
| back when keeping up with dependency management was exciting.
| booleanbetrayal wrote:
| lol ... found it @
| http://web.archive.org/web/19980419152907/http://freshmeat.u...
|
| What a nostalgia trigger. This was from back when Freshmeat was
| on unreal.org!
| bloopernova wrote:
| Freshmeat, Slashdot, Everything2, Advogato, and more. Relics from
| a time when the Internet felt like a wild frontier.
|
| The immense buzz when Mozilla open sourced Navigator/Firefox. The
| crazy first day of the IPO of VA Software (+698% above initial
| price!!!)
|
| 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'd just open a
| terminal and run "/bin/install --etc" and laughed at the horror
| on the faces of the assembled Mac evangelists)
|
| 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 _getting it_.
|
| Not much of a point to this comment, just a big old nostalgia
| bomb early in my morning :)
| mooreds wrote:
| I remember when I discovered Slashdot, using lynx as my
| browser. Felt like a whole wide world had opened up.
|
| Long arguments about linux and micro$oft, the excitement when I
| got more karma. Ah, the glories of youth.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Freshmeat, Slashdot, Everything2, Advogato, and more."_
|
| kuro5hin was another site that I wish I had an accessible
| archive of.
|
| That's where I first heard of bitcoin... long before it was
| worth even a penny.
|
| I've since wondered who made that first article talking about
| bitcoin on that site.. but there's no way to check, since I
| only have my own memories to go on.
| fullstop wrote:
| I watched Freshmeat, religiously, for updates to GTK,
| WindowMaker, and WMPrefs. I don't even know why I built each
| release other than because I could and because I was learning
| so much.
|
| I later started building KDE weekly from cvs during their push
| toward 2.0, using their odd cvsup tool and somehow lived
| through their desktop during their CORBA phase. Again, I
| learned so much during this time which has been extremely
| useful for my occupation today.
|
| It was a neat time to live in, for sure.
| bxjx wrote:
| Great comment! This brought back so many similar memories -
| spending hours configuring Enlightenment and tweaking my
| desktop with transparency and flames (I hope Rasterman is still
| out there coding somewhere), everything2, audioscrobbler and
| last.fm.
|
| You're so right that the internet seemed so full of
| possibilities.
| zelos wrote:
| He worked on OpenMoko for a while when they chose
| enlightenment libs for the UI.
| johnisgood wrote:
| The Enlightenment that has always been 17 and we were waiting
| for it to finally turn to 18? The one that had transparent
| windows through some plugins or whatever? Hell yeah! I
| installed it on Gentoo and when I made the windows
| transparent, I felt like I could do anything! I had Beryl,
| too, at some point.
| josephd79 wrote:
| I still use last.fm lol
| eliaspro wrote:
| I started using it when it still was called
| AudioScrobbler... I miss "the old internet" so much!
| mark_undoio wrote:
| Enlightenment was a particular favourite for me! But
| Rasterman is, as far as I know, still coding like crazy on
| new versions of Enlightenment: https://www.enlightenment.org/
|
| It's evolved into more of a desktop now that plain window
| managers aren't something people usually think of. It's still
| got great eye candy, though I miss some of the old themes I
| used to use.
|
| The Enlightenment libraries were used in Samsung's Tizen OS
| too - hopefully they got some consultancy money out of that
| (or similar).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Tizen is practically dead.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| It's a hellscape of misery and suffering.
|
| https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
| badsectoracula wrote:
| That article is wrong on several levels and the author
| just doesn't seem to understand what is going on. The
| whole part about how to set up windows is him not
| understanding that he's working with a retained mode
| scene graph - something the documentation[0] makes that
| clear.
|
| Ironically you are more likely to see such an approach in
| modern GUI toolkits than when EFL was written.
|
| [0] https://docs.tizen.org/application/native/guides/ui/e
| fl/grap...
| jancsika wrote:
| You left out the best part-- the enlightenment developer
| starts replying in page five of the comments and gets
| caught up in a flame war!
|
| https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened/243?
| lan...
|
| It really does seem like the author of the article didn't
| read the docs, though. E.g., he states that Genlist "in
| essence is a list widget with some items." But according
| to the docs the "simple list" widget is the tool that
| fits that definition. Genlist is way more complex and
| apparently meant to handle situations with a large number
| of total items. Whether reallocation is an appropriate
| approach to get that complexity I don't know. But if it's
| the wrong tool for the job, who cares?
| jcims wrote:
| Don't forget the dark arts of configuring the Modeline in
| your X config to get that rock solid, flicker free screen of
| ridiculous resolution. And when you would push the limits and
| hear your crt scream in protest or start tumbling, tearing or
| just tapping out.
| krylon wrote:
| Oh yes. I absolutely _hated_ editing that file, but when I
| got lucky and got it right on the first or second try, that
| rush was something I doubt Windows or Mac users get often.
| Although now that I 'm a bit older, I'm glad I don't need
| to do that anymore.
|
| The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS
| to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail
| end of that era.
|
| Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/
| sobkas wrote:
| > Oh yes. I absolutely hated editing that file, but when
| I got lucky and got it right on the first or second try,
| that rush was something I doubt Windows or Mac users get
| often. Although now that I'm a bit older, I'm glad I
| don't need to do that anymore.
|
| > The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on
| DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see
| the tail end of that era.
|
| > Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/
|
| Oh the times before it was xorg. And even before that,
| when for a proper modular accelerated X you had to pay or
| use X build for your graphic card. I remember buying new
| graphic card just to use a new modular XFree86(no drivers
| for my old one).
|
| Now everything is so easy...
| krylon wrote:
| Hehe. I like to think I'm not that much of an old timer,
| but I _do_ remember having to download the driver for my
| sound card (Aureal Vortex <$something>) and compile an
| out-of-tree-module to get sound.
|
| For a long, long time I was happy to even get XFree86 and
| later Xorg to work without 3D acceleration. By the time I
| started to care, helpful people from the Internet had
| taken care of most of the revolting details.
|
| And when proper 3D acceleration became important (compiz
| was just _gorgeous_ ), vendors were reasonably happy to
| supply drivers for their GPUs.
|
| In essence, though, I agree, Linux-on-the-desktop has
| gotten so much more easy over the past ~20 years.
| bombcar wrote:
| The closest I have to those is painstakingly trying
| _every_ single VESA driver on the SimCity 2000 CD until I
| found one that would work with whatever off-brand video
| card the 386 happened to have (it was an Oak driver,
| though I think the card just happened to be compatible
| with it).
| bloopernova wrote:
| Was it Rasterman's Rxvt/Xterm .Xresources I used for his
| great colour scheme? I think so.
|
| I actually met my first wife through Everything2. At the risk
| of further exposing who I am, I even hosted the site at the
| University of Michigan Business School's little datacentre
| for a while. Good times!
| samstave wrote:
| Sputnik, LinuxCare, GLP (fringe side), fark...
|
| Linuxcare is close to me... but I wont go into details. The
| first linux unicorn and crashed and burned, personally from my
| perspective, getting too hyper-valued-on-paper-too-fast
| pjmlp wrote:
| Remember MKLinux as well?
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| I was watching Twitch developer stream where the young streamer
| was working with a new TUI library/service discussed earlier on
| HN[1]. I half jokingly asked a question if it worked with real
| hardware terminals, in particular a DEC VT420, and the
| developer didn't even know what that is.
|
| Feels old, man.
|
| Oh, and it turns out the service doesn't work well on my VT420,
| but I understand why that's not exactly a priority.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048332
| johnisgood wrote:
| Feels... yeah... sorta saddening.
| em-bee wrote:
| i really like how the advogato site got preserved on
| archive.org through redirects from the original site. so that
| all urls pointing to it are still working.
| randallsquared wrote:
| And kuro5hin, a sort of mix between Slashdot and Substack...
| iszomer wrote:
| Yep, I remember spending far too much time reading kuro5hin.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I wasn't familiar with Freshmeat but you just unlocked a part
| of my memory mentioning everything2... I spent a lot of time of
| that site in 2001-2002 (probably earlier as well as a lurker,
| but that's the years when I wrote things), I really loved it
| and was also very useful for me to practice English writing at
| a time when my English skills were still rather limited (I
| remember writing my texts painfully slowly, and looking words
| up...).
|
| I've just checked and felt a warm feeling in my heart seeing
| that the website is still up, and not only that, but I can even
| login into my account that hadn't been used since 2002 or so
| (didn't remember my username, but the account is tied to an
| email account that I've had since around 1997 (!) so it was
| easy to recover).
|
| I might write again from time to time...
|
| Thanks for mentioning it!
|
| PS: How can one have such fond memories of something locked in
| the brain stored somewhere, and only remember them when someone
| mentions it? I wonder how many nice memories from that time are
| still lost somewhere in my head.
| wiremine wrote:
| I went to high school with CmdrTaco (Slashdot) and Nate
| (Everything2). I built sets for plays with Rob and was Nate's
| lab partner in AP Bio. Both were (are) brilliant guys, and
| super nice. Rob's sense of humor was one of a kind. (Jeff
| Bates was also a great guy, but I didn't know him as well.)
|
| It was a unique time back in the late 90s, and those guys had
| their finger on the pulse of internet nerdom. It was pre-
| Facebook, pre-"Web 2.0" pre a lot of things. In a lot of ways
| Slashdot was the spiritual predecessor to Hacker News, so we
| owe that crew a debt.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yeah... when I said I would go back 20 years, this is what
| I was talking about... sort of... Those were the great
| times! Maybe I am just old and nostalgic and it may be
| something everyone does, but for real, those times had lots
| of issues, too, sure, but there were great things. People
| had interest in philosophy, free Internet, and so forth.
| floren wrote:
| Did you ever listen to "Geeks in Space", the Slashdot
| podcast from before podcasts were a thing?
|
| IIRC they recorded sporadically around 1999 and 2000, just
| talking about whatever had been on the front page recently.
| I've thought about doing a sort of retrospective, listening
| to each one and writing a blog post about what they found
| interesting... it's a neat peek back at a different time
| and a different culture.
| wiremine wrote:
| No, I didn't. I wonder if any of those episodes are still
| around?
| floren wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/Geeks_In_Space
| gilleain wrote:
| Indeed yes, E2 was so much better in many ways than things
| like Wikipedia (and worse in other ways, of course).
|
| The ability to create amusing nodeshells, or posts that were
| just ASCII pictures of a fish swimming from a shark ("The
| birth of leadership"), or poems, or in-depth analysis of some
| interesting idea or thing.
|
| Everything2 was where I first made real content on the web,
| and was proud of what I created. Like a precursor to answers
| on Stack Overflow (or other SE sites).
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I loved e2. It was such a shame to see it fall in to disuse
| as everyone flocked to wikipedia.
|
| Wikipedia is great for factual stuff, but e2 was much more
| nurturing of creativity.
| dmd wrote:
| I (dmd) was in the top 5% of noders back then, went to a
| bunch of gatherings (like https://everything2.com/title/I%252
| 7M+GUNNA+BE+WICKED+RETAHD... ). It was a wonderful time.
| gilleain wrote:
| Yes, also remember a meetup in London, was ... interesting.
|
| (used 'The Alchemist' as a username - probably because I
| was into reading about it at the time. Unfortunately most
| people probably thought I liked that book of the same
| name).
| bloopernova wrote:
| Hola, from me, dizzy
| bloopernova wrote:
| I was known as dizzy. It's been a long, long time :)
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I remember that name.
|
| I went to a meetup in Melbourne. Met a girl in Chicago.
| Discovered that someone else lived literally on my street,
| a third of a mile away. I had several small world
| experiences on E2.
| encloser wrote:
| Wow! Lots of memories flooding back. I (Xamot) remember
| your nickname. E2 was definitely an interesting place,
| bringing together people from many walks of life. I meet
| many people, who influenced who I am today. And it is
| unlikely that I would have met such a range of people
| otherwise.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| On more than one occasion I got called to a 'please explain'
| meeting to clarify that Freshmeat was not a "barely legal" porn
| site.
| js2 wrote:
| > The crazy first day of the IPO of VA Software (+698% above
| initial price!!!)
|
| VA made F&F shares available to anyone who could document an
| open-source contribution to Linux. I think my addition of the
| "-e" switch to chpasswd was sufficient.
|
| I recall that I purchased 140 shares at $30. I held on to those
| shares the first day all the way up to $300/share or whatever
| it was, and then kept holding the shares in the coming days and
| weeks all the way back down. I eventually sold a few years
| later for maybe $1/share. At least the loss was able to offset
| some LTGC.
|
| I purchased some wisdom with that experience.
|
| Edit: I left the same comment on this story in 2014:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925266
|
| (I must be really boring at parties.)
| tempnow987 wrote:
| I was a broke student. I sold first day (luckily) just
| because I didn't have the money to hold onto them for any
| length of time. Worked out, but then my school took it back
| by reducing my financial aid award (OUCH).
| lenova wrote:
| > I purchased some wisdom with that experience.
|
| That such an excellent way to phrase it, I may steal it ;-)
| glonq wrote:
| Don't forget Digg and Fark. I spent time on those post-slashdot
| / pre-reddit.
| danudey wrote:
| > Slashdot
|
| No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
| haberman wrote:
| And SourceForge. It was the GitHub of its day, in terms of
| ubiquity and popularity.
|
| It's hard to believe, given how corporate and ad-heavy it is
| now, but there was a time when one of the first considerations
| in naming a new project was seeing whether foo.sf.net was
| available.
| wiz21c wrote:
| > Tweaking settings to get the best X11+Enlightenment speed
| possible
|
| So much time lost :-) Thx rasterman !
| kalleboo wrote:
| I spent the year coming up to the release of Mac OS X in flame
| wars adamant that Apple including Terminal.app in OS X would
| bring down the end of usability on the Mac, and it would bring
| an Era where all users would end up being forced to use it for
| certain tasks...
| yankcrime wrote:
| Your comment was exactly what I had in mind when I posted this
| story - especially the bit about Enlightenment!
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| I somehow feel tiling WMs occupy the same mindspace these
| days.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| > 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 getting it.
|
| Until you looked at old usenet / mailing list archives and
| realized you were already well into the eternal September by
| that stage!
|
| (I'm being a bit facetious -- I think all eras have their
| pluses and minuses, comp.* etc heyday was before my time but it
| was quite amazing to see some of the in depth discussions and
| names involved. That's where the infamous Tanenbaum-Torvalds
| debate took place for example, and it was not uncommon to see
| CPU and operating system and other software designers from
| different organizations debating everything from kernels to
| TCP/IP enhancements to compiler theory to TLBs. Generally under
| their real names.)
| rasz wrote:
| Yes, usenet, good old deeply technical discussions like
|
| "Have you ever kissed a girl?" https://groups.google.com/g/co
| mp.sys.sun.hardware/c/wCd7fHnz...
|
| by Sun employee Bryan Cantrill (dtrace) :)
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Many of the people you meet in cloud services today at places
| like IBM, Dell, HP etc, are "old hippies" from that internet
| 1.0 era. Or even earlier from the Unix golden age of SG and Sun
| workstations. Mostly drifting into sales / pm roles. Although
| everyone remembers things differently. That institutional
| grounding of having to build internet services from fiber up
| really puts things in perspective for how easy it is to spin up
| a cluster ;)
| asteroidp wrote:
| Once sf.net became a super obnoxious piece with shady ads. It was
| an incredibly fast exodus.
| johng wrote:
| I used to love browsing the site trying to find new stuff to try
| out on one of my Linux boxes. Good memories.
| bcrescimanno wrote:
| 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 "./configure && make && make
| install" was burned into my mind. As others have said, it really
| felt like the "wild west." 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.
|
| 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.
| blippage wrote:
| 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.
|
| By which I mean I've noticed that a large percentage of sites are
| converging to a a very similar aesthetic and demographic. Let me
| call this the "Zoomer Influencer Aesthetic". 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.
|
| If you go back 10 years or so, it was a lot about content. You
| had something to say. Now it's a case that YOU are the content.
| It's all about you, how great your life is, how you're an
| "influencer", 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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 "no". Posts aren't dated (damn your teeth!), they
| seemed unsuitable for technical discussion, and they had that
| "Pinterest" feel to it. I quickly ruled it out. There were a few
| other sites I investigated, but figured they weren't all that
| great. Too much navigation and baloney. I'm looking for something
| simple.
|
| Anyway, that's all for now. Now get off my lawn!
| victorstanciu wrote:
| > Too much navigation and baloney. I'm looking for something
| simple.
|
| Static site generator (I like Hugo) + Github. Use Github
| Actions to build it, and Github Pages to serve it. Cloudflare
| on top if you want a custom domain (for the auto SSL).
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| 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.
| "Ahhh, fresh meat!"
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Fresh meat is just a term for someone new. This reminds me of
| when I used the word "zealot" on a forum back in the same era
| and someone was _adamant_ that it came from Starcraft and
| wondered why I was making a Starcraft reference when talking
| about zealotry.
| yakireev wrote:
| This happens a lot with folks who aren't native English
| speakers. It took me years to find out that "bash", "lisp",
| "git", "grub", etc are actual words.
|
| Also, "tinder" - how the are you supposed to know what that
| is if you're learning the language in XXI century? It took me
| way too long to realize that "tinder", "match" and the fire
| logo are a clever wordplay.
| kazinator wrote:
| A few weeks ago, while driving, my eyes fixated on some
| Mitsubishi car's logo, and my mind wandered off: what is
| this "bishi"? That must just be rendaku from some "hishi"?
| Wait, I know what that is: hishi is water chestnut, which
| serves as a metaphor for the rhombus shape "hishigata"
| (like the word "diamond" does in English). So then it of
| course hit me: doh, three (mitsu) diamonds (hishi) in the
| logo.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Did you ever play a Sonic game?
|
| Miles "Tails" Prower's name is a play on Miles Per Hour.
| Even a lot of native English speakers in mile-using
| countries miss it.
|
| I try to take a Today's Lucky 10,000 approach to these
| situations.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| It's amazing that first century Jews were playing StarCraft.
| That game is true classic.
| thwarted wrote:
| Anyone have a copy of the really early freshmeat header
| image/logo that was a closeup of a tattoo being applied to
| someone's back, but mildly obscured because it was keyholed
| through the text? It was during a period where freshmeat had a
| dark/black background/theme.
|
| Due to redirects, it seems like archive.org doesn't have it.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Yeah, that header... in between that and the domain name, I am
| sure I am not alone in having to explain to an overly officious
| boss/security department that it was all kosher.
| incanus77 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| smudgy wrote:
| Damn, this just kicked my nostalgia centers into high gear.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I miss Kuro5hin.org
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin
| abotsis wrote:
| 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.
| DrBazza wrote:
| More nostalgia - reminds of sourceforge in particular and other
| 90-00s sites and products that were vacuumed up by various
| companies claiming to "add value" and then essentially destroying
| the thing.
|
| Anything bought by IBM or Embarcadero seems to end up being
| abandonware too.
|
| Not sure that's happening so much these days, but that's what
| happened to the 90/00s web.
| degenerate wrote:
| Someone still runs https://freshcode.club but it appears to be
| mostly automated.
| vidarh wrote:
| There's an instance still running, but frozen in time at the 2014
| state here: http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/
|
| "Content may be stale" indeed (from the header)...
| cpach wrote:
| I really liked Freshmeat!
|
| These days, AlternativeTo is a pretty good... ehm, alternative.
|
| https://alternativeto.net/
| beeforpork wrote:
| Can I browse the stream of all update notifications? Can I
| establish filters to the full stream of changes? It was
| absolutely fantastic and addictive to do that in Freshmeat --
| with so many projects to find and explore. And despite the
| volume, it could be filtered down to what could (barely) be
| consumed.
| eps wrote:
| That's more up Softpedia's alley.
| justinator wrote:
| The amount of traffic my little Perl app got from Freshmeat was
| astounding. Paid my way through college.
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