releaseszn is open

releaseszn is open: a feed of software releases, one screenshot at a time, where every meaningful release gets a fair shot at being seen, and at Release of the Day, Week and Month.

Remember freshmeat? #

If you were around open source in the late ’90s and 2000s, you probably remember freshmeat.net. It started in 1997 as a simple idea: every time someone released a new version of their software, it got a short entry on the front page. Version number, a few lines about what changed, a link. That was it, and it worked. You’d check it every morning and find tools you’d never have found otherwise, from people you’d never heard of. Shipping a release was the announcement.

Freshmeat became Freecode in 2011 and stopped being updated in 2014. Plenty has replaced it for news and discussion, but nothing has replaced that simple loop: you ship, people see it.

releaseszn is that idea, rebuilt for today: releases instead of launches, with a real screenshot on every one.

Built for people without an audience #

Here’s the part we care about most.

Today, whether a new project gets noticed depends mostly on who posts it. Someone with a big following on X or YouTube ships a weekend project and it gets thousands of views by lunch. Someone without one ships something better, posts it to the same places, and hears nothing. Not because it wasn’t good, but because nobody was there to see it.

A good idea is a good idea, whatever the size of the following behind it. releaseszn is built so that the work decides, not the audience:

• Every eligible release gets a first look. For its first two days, a new release has places kept for it in the home feed, and on the fresh page, until about a hundred people have seen it. A first release from someone nobody follows is seen by real people.
• Votes are compared with views. A release’s score is its votes divided by how many people actually saw it. Three hundred people seeing your release and liking it beats three thousand seeing it and scrolling past. Traffic alone doesn’t buy a ranking.
• Votes are weighted, followers aren’t. A vote counts according to the voter’s own GitHub account, its age and its history, so accounts made last week to vote count for nothing. How many followers you start with plays no part in your score.
• No paid placement, ever. Nothing you can buy changes a ranking.

If you’ve been building something good and quietly shipping it to nobody, this is for you.

Releases, not launches #

A launch is one day of attention. A project that keeps getting better deserves to be seen again, so every major or minor release is a new entry in the feed and a new chance at the boards. Patch releases are still published and still reach the people who follow your project; they just don’t compete.

Two rules keep that fair: a release competes if it came out on GitHub in the last two weeks, and if the GitHub account behind it is at least three months old. Anything else is published all the same, just not ranked.

A screenshot on every release #

Every release has a hero screenshot, and the site checks it: real resolution, sharp, not mostly empty, not an enlarged thumbnail, and different from your last release’s. When something’s off, it tells you exactly what to fix, down to how many pixels to crop. The result is a feed you can actually browse, one picture at a time. Terminal screenshots of CLI tools are very welcome. See Release requirements.

Publish with your coding agent #

There’s no submission form. Sign in with GitHub, create an API token, and tell your coding agent:

Follow https://releaseszn.com/docs/submit-prompt.md to publish the latest
release of this project on releaseszn.

The agent reads your project, writes a real changelog from your commits, attaches a real screenshot, runs the checks, and asks you before it publishes. It takes a few minutes. The Quickstart has the details.

What we stand for #

• Honest AI tags. AI-assisted and AI-generated projects are welcome. An honest tag lets people filter; quality decides the rest.
• Quality over volume. Real changelogs, real screenshots, real releases from GitHub. You can’t post a version you didn’t ship.
• Rankings from people. API tokens can’t vote. Rankings come from people browsing the site, and how ranking works is documented.

Show us what you’ve built #

If you’ve shipped something recently, publish your release. If you haven’t shipped anything in a while, maybe this is the nudge.

And tell us what you think: ideas, bugs and questions go to the feedback page. We read every message.

And tell your friends!