[jrvieira]

I suspect it's a long way from what it's meant here by "online personal projects i can interact with" and "median github/pypy/npm crap".

Speaking for myself, I remember a time when personal ("indy") projects had the reputation of being better cared for than big company products before online repositories were even a thing.

[EdwardKrayer]

Can you give some examples? Because personally, I don't remember any period where personal projects weren't normally hacked together, but my experience only goes back to the early 2000s. It would be interesting to hear your memories of it.

[jrvieira]

I'm not alone in this and we don't need to go much further back than the early '00s! Great time to sample from.

I had a Mac at the time so here's some from the top of my head that I remember being very popular: Quicksilver and LaunchBar, NetNewsWire, Coda and Transmit (anything from Panic, really), Growl, AudioHijack and Soundflower, Unarchiver, iA Writer... these were insanely well crafted apps with no real competition from big companies in that regard.

Apple infamously capitalized on this indy development phenomenon with the creation of the AppStore model in 2008, first on the iPhone and later on the Mac.

Outside of this ecosystem I can remember WinAmp, Total Commander, WinRar, 7-zip, VLC, Foobar, mIRC, Paint.NET, μTorrent, FileZilla, Reaper, SublimeText...

Macromedia was a medium sized company with huge global success for their size, and they had some of the best software out there at the time before their acquisition. Adobe immediately polluted it.

Thoughtful, ad-free, bloat free, passion-driven software with attention to detail, good design and great performance was an attribute of small independent teams, not big software companies.

[warkdarrior]

These are all examples from 20 years ago. Anything more recent?