The Antidesktop aside, but I'm missing freshmeat website. It seems that most open source stuff is advertised now on www.openhub.net but I'm not sure if this still have the same spirit.
I actually did not realize freshmeat was gone until seeing this post. Apparently freshmeat became freecode.com sometime in 2011 with a terrible new layout. Then subdomains like palm.freecode.com disappeared entirely in 2013, after Dice Holdings acquired and ruined Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode. Those three websites were acquired by some holding company BIZX LLC last year, and the new owners seem to be serious about removing malware and adware from SourceForge and turning it around: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_...
IMO the best thing they can do for freshmeat is restore the old pages and layout. There was some really good, hard-to-find information on that site.
The themes section is what I mourn the most. It was a great repository of computer art. And frankly, the content there was a lot more original, bold and and innovative than what you see on *-look.org today.
Github is nice, but it's not quite the same. Freshmeat was more about new releases and discovery. It was the daily list of new ideas (some terrible ..) and software updates in the open source world. Today Github alone doesn't do that. It's more like GitHub + Hackernews or Reddit or some other aggregation site to show you what's new and neat or updated.
There was a lot of dreaming during that time (late 90s/early 2000s) of what we could accomplish in the OSS communities. Slowly community projects became part of foundations or startup/corporate controlled. Gimp never took the place of Photoshop, and many of the lofty ideas about open source really started to fade:
Freshmeat was not about hosting, but announcement of releases, and discovery of projects that people had deemed "release-worthy", and providing structured information about it.
I love Github, but it doesn't serve the same purpose. (Neither does openhub).
What was great about Freshmeat was being able to go to the front page every morning and scan through the new releases and discover new cool projects or releases of important software.
If anything, while Freshmeat would be vastly harder to do right today, it'd also potentially be a far better project today given how much more open source software is out there, but it'd need to be run by someone willing to do a lot of work to either let people customise what appears on their front page or enforcing a strong editorial policy to pick the most interesting updates rather than just spew everything... That worked back when "everything" was little enough for people to skim through everything, but not today.
That said, like others, I too miss it in a mostly abstract way, in that I first realised it had stopped updating long after it happened - like e.g. Slashdot, I'd slowly checked it less and less and until it stopped being part of my daily routine. I'm glad they've kept it there as a historical artefact at least, and hope it stays as a reminder.
