Why is freepost retiring?
7 votes c/freepost Posted by Peter Panski — 7 votes, 15 commentsSource

I, myself, have less and less time to read and post here. Seems like a natural development then if this is the same for others. What would be a good alternative? I like lobsters but would need someoen to vouche for me to post there.

Lack of usage, and it doesn’t seem like it’s useful to anybody. I’ll be moving on to other projects.
Thank you Peter for having been part of this. Unfortunately I cannot recommend anything else.

zPlus, thanks for running freepo.st for all of us to use over the years. For me it has made a positive impact. I will miss it, but I understand the desire to move on to something else.

Thank you vaeringjar. It warms my heart to know that it had a positive impact on others despite being such a small project.

I visit pretty much every day (though somehow didn’t see this thread until now, might have to check my eyesight), so to me this site is very useful! Unfortunately I don’t log in and post that often because I’m lazy.
If only I didn’t have enough on my plate I’d offer to help maintain if you’re stepping down but willing to keep the site up.
Maybe I could donate or something? If you’d sell some merch like minimal design t-shirts I’d eat those in a hearbeat.

Same. Freepo.st is awesome. Even though a lot of it is a regurgitation of HN articles, almost everything here is relevant to FOSS. A lot of interesting pieces get posted here that I would miss from the overloaded front page of HN.

Not to mention the layout of the site, how clean everything is, and how fast it all loads - without proprietary scripts or trackers.

I’m sure there’s a lot more of us who kick back and sponge up all the content. Only other site that really compares is the Trisquel forums and those are pretty much dead / filled with spam.

zPlus: thanks a lot for developing and maintaining freepo.st. While I seldom comment on the site, I check the RSS feed regularly and post the occasional link. I’m sorry to see it go, but it’s understandable. At times moving on is necessary to make way for better things to come. Good luck with other projects!

Thank you iko!

I found it very useful in finding articles about Free Software and other topics to share elsewhere. Sorry I haven’t been as active as I had been, life comes in waves as I’m sure you know. Again, thank you.

Thank you for your engagement! I wonder if I could continue running it? How much did it cost? Had you a lot of trouble with any kind of abuse?

The only costs are domain, hosting, and time. Abuse, yes, from spambots as always. There isn’t an administration panel though. I dealt with it by removing spam accounts/posts directly from the database by hand, and restricting registrations altogether during spam waves.

Peter, I’ve read some posts at lobste.rs before, but I have not participated in comments and at least to date I do not frequent that website. After/by December I might have a different idea, though.

Unfortunately I don’t know of any direct alternatives with an emphasis on FOSS perspectives. There is Tildes which is more Reddit-like, less active, and seems to have a nice community. Lemmy, also Reddit-like and based on ActivityPub has an open source group among others. Hope you find what you’re looking for.

zPlus: Thank you for the time and effort that you put in to making this possible. I have enjoyed a place for free speech to voice my thoughts and opinions and to read others. I am glad to have been able to be a part of this community, even if we all don’t always see eye to eye it has been a positive in my opinion. Free speech and free thought and expression, as well as open discourse, are very important and there needs to be more not less.

Peace to you in your further projects, and peace to all of you as well who I have engaged with over these years. I will still peek in from time to time until the end.

Maybe some Lemmy instance. Specially, http://jeremmy.ml/ which is new but dedicated to Free Software and a bit far from political stuff if you don’t like https://lemmy.ml.

I am sorry to hear that Freepost will soon be no more. First, this is one of the few places on the Internet where I can post these types of articles from my blog. Second, I also run a tiny forum called bluedwarf.top that covers Internet-related topics as well as others, so the death of small forums like this is not a trend I like to see.