Way back in early 2024 (man, this has been a long year), Replit, a website and company allowing people to program, deploy, and share there creations, made some changes. This led to the downfall of one of the biggest programmer communities.
Before I joined Glitch, where I program to this day, I had Replit. It was a wonderful home, IDE, and so much more. I shared so many projects with the world, and had so much fun growing and learning from the other people. That was until they released an update on there blog simply called “Updates to Social Features on Replit.” While the words inside may sound happy and they may seem exited, they really were trying to sneak this in:
When I heard this, it was like I was slapped. Now, that may sound overdramatic, but honestly, there were so many people who I collaborated with, who helped me, who I helped, and so much. There was a project on Replit that taught me CSS Keyframe animations: a thing that I use to this day!
I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. There were projects that started popping up that were called things like “Don’t Remove the community” and so on. One of the more famous programmers even created a “Replit’s Last Comments” which was a project where comments were stored in a readme. (If anyone knows where this is now, PLEASE let me know!)
So, as the day looms over the community, everyone sends there goodbyes… and…
Silence.
It was gone.
Actually, it wasn’t completely gone. They still had the support forums, where the community was existing and talking. Along with these changes they removed free deployments, which really hurt, and forced me to take down my Discord bot and find an alternative (that’s where Glitch came in).
Now, look back at last month. Everyday, I would go to the Replit Forum to see what was new. One day, I get the screen saying that the address couldn’t be found. This was very confusing. It did this for a couple of days, and then one day, it took me to the new “community hub” page. No forum. No people. Just a bunch of links to social media.
Now it was gone.
For good.
Now I have been working to find some of the profiles that I used to follow and connect to them. It isn’t easy. They removed the search feature, but not the profiles, so you can still go to replit.com/@ followed by the username.
If there are people who know where the “Replit’s Last Comments” project is, or if you migrated from replit, please mention it in the comments!