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 :)
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.
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.
I remember working at early-stage Amazon in 1998, and I would check Slashdot something like 4-5x per day. I remember that period before and after Slashdot was acquired by Andover.net fondly, especially CmdrTaco, Hemos, and CowboyNeal.
I would also include, along with Everything2, (I recall a guy named Tim Vroom—I think he attended Hope College with the Slashdot guys as well?) its sister site PerlMonks.org. Man, I spent a lot of time there learning Perl and reading up on CPAN modules. I'd hate to be maintaining any of the code we wrote then now though!
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.
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.
I remember working at early-stage Amazon in 1998, and I would check Slashdot something like 4-5x per day. I remember that period before and after Slashdot was acquired by Andover.net fondly, especially CmdrTaco, Hemos, and CowboyNeal.
I would also include, along with Everything2, (I recall a guy named Tim Vroom?) its sister site PerlMonks.org. Man, I spent a lot of time there learning Perl and reading up on CPAN modules.
All of those guys were great, but oddly I interacted the most with Hemos, probably due to mutual interests in things like Frank Herbert and weird ambient music (e.g. Eno, Laswell).
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.
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).
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.
you might not. my name is raj, and i used to run a hosting company called voxel.net — i believe you were a customer “back in the day” but i could be getting my wires crossed ;)
Hah, yes! I hosted my personal domain 3e.org - which I've now had for 26 years! - with you from 2000-2003 or so. (After that I was on 'server4you' for a bit, self-hosting everything on a VPS, and then Dreamhost since 2005.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
I do too, but I wish they'd do something with it instead of letting it languish. Scrobbling keeps breaking. How hard could it be to keep a scrobbling site up in 2022?
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.
Zoom out. Ignoring the fact everyone now has a supercomputer in their pocket, now you can literally outcompute that era of terminals for <$1. Huge flat screens hang in literally every room with resolutions dozens of times higher per axis than anything of that period. Voice input is finally here, and the very notion of a 'terminal' has become an anachronism.
In context, therefore, I think it's understandable.
> 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:
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).
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.
Once the old guard left or were jettisoned from VA, the fall was inevitable. The desperation crept in to survive and it rapidly became a race to the bottom.
I knew once folks like the Thinkgeek founders and the last of the core SF team bolted that no hope was left. The fact that it survives, even in its current punchline without a setup configuration, might be a testament to how well and durable it started at.
"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.
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...
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 ;)
> 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.)
And yes I'm aware of that comment and it's a personal favorite of mine. Not the message by itself, but in the context the tantrum is the ultimate tacit surrender and humiliation of the big professional corporate clunky slow old proprietary OS to this open source upstart.
Miller's post was pretty strong out of the gate ("Solaris is a pig") but it had a lot of interesting technical content.
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.
I was at VA then, and it was an utterly bonkers rollercoaster through the breach of pre "disruption-obsessed SV. I don't see that era ever returning, as we've now made "disruption" a programmatic end in and of itself.
I have a lot of fond memories from around those times too. especially when linuxworld expo was in San Jose. you could drive by the VA Linux offices. Caldera OpenLinux was in a box at Fry's.
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
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
I use to love browsing freshmeat and tucows for new applications, seeing new applications. Not new versions, actual new applications. Applications I didnt know about that came in real handy. New desktop apps, new linux x11 apps, etc. Was a great time.
Closet thing I can think of today is alternative to, but thats just related apps, not new inventions.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I started off with windows 98, was linux for most of my life but in the mean time had to use enough windows 2000, 7 and 10 to be dangerous. Got sent an M1 Mac Laptop for a contract last year, and didn't really get it. Now happily using a weird minimalist linux distro with a window manager.
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.
I still have a reminder of relying on Freshmeat, in a 1999 Web page at the MIT Media Lab:
> Probably the best directory of Linux software right now is Freshmeat (http://www.freshmeat.net/). You can use the full-text search or the category-based browsing (labeled "appindex"). Note that the category scheme is kinda odd.
I also pointed people at `rpmfind.net`. I'd find those random packages scary today (like I do xda-developers), but it was a more innocent time.
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.
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.
I can't understand the sentence : "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 & Dragons crowd."
can someone explain it ? What is the implied link between big parties and 'Dungeons & Dragons crowd' ?
At a guess, the intended contrast is not to do with big parties per se, but that between a "party designed for frat boys" and a "Dungeons & Dragons crowd".
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
This is definitely not the case. At minimum there are web browser releases and OS related releases (distro releases, Linux kernel releases, glibc releases, bash releases etc). Then there are releases of each of the dependencies for web apps. There are releases for various desktops like GNOME/KDE and also apps like Krita/Inkscape/Blender.
Only the original Unix shell is that old and isn't in use today. All the shells in use today are newer than that. They all definitely have bug fixes that people today care about though.
Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925135 - June 2014 (76 comments)