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.