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Comment by sanswork | Hacker News Reader

I haven't thought of Freshmeat in probably 8 years. Amazing to see that they are still around. Does anyone here actually actively use them anymore? If so how? Back in the day I would use it to watch for new releases of different types of software to try out and experiment with.

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I think freshmeat/freecode used to serve a niche that has now been filled by the open source community and the web itself. When announcements for new code releases used to happen on mailing lists and download links used to be tarballs, it was relevant to have a feed to notify you of new releases.

Now, new code releases happen at places like github, google code, and bitbucket, and the releases are almost immediately pushed upstream to package maintainers / repositories, blogs, twitter accounts, etc. Therefore, rather than a rebrand, I think what they really need to do is accept that their time is no longer here and go for a deadpool. Hard pill to swallow, perhaps, but probably the best medicine.

From time to time when I'm looking for an application for some particular task, I search freshmeat. The last time I checked it I was looking for an Ascii drawing tool, and found several such good tools.

I visit once a week to view the projects that have been updated over the week. Keeps me aware of new projects and up to date on the status of stuff that I use every day but might not otherwise know how its progressing.

Personally, I'm kinda bummed about the the change of name.

I'm only reminded of their existence when I'm surfing slashdot

Same here. And to go one level deeper, I'm only reminded of Slashdot's existence when someone mentions them on Hacker News or reddit.

To think about how much time I use to spend on slashdot to go to seeing one of my developers reading it the other month and actually saying "You're who keeps slashdot around?!". It's a weird feeling.

Made me think of AppWatch, a similar site which was curated by the owners to include only high-quality open-source, and was acquired by CNet in 2001: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cnet-networks-acquir...

Relive the glory: http://web.archive.org/web/20010629001952/http://appwatch.co...

Sadly, it's just redirecting to zdnet.com now.

I use them for occasional code surfing.

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