Via kottke.org at the end of January 2000, but I wasn't interested enough to join until I him mention it again in mid April of that year.
posted by riffola at 12:32 PM on April 27, 2006
My home on the web
I remember when MetaFilter was mathowie posting a lot of links regularly because it hadn't still caught on. My favourite moments were the formative years 2000 and 2001 (till Fall of 2001). It's what I refer to as the Golden Era of MetaFilter. I liked being a part of a budding community where people were just as passionate about finding new and interesting things on the internet as I was. From waxpancake to quonsar, everyone on the site was a friend who was excited to share something amazing they found with two thousand of their closest friends. It was always exciting when I found something that was worthy of being posted to the Blue.
But the highlight of the site for me was MetaTalk, that's where all the fun happened. I loved how a significant majority of the site was very, very protective of mathowie. Even today, when ever I hear the name of a certain founder of a massively popular social networking-y site, I always think of him as the guy who used to bug mathowie about how Matt should run MeFi. Everyone would run to defend Matt, it was a community that truly cared and appreciated the hardwork Matt put into the site and his virtually invisible moderation. Matt's way of running this site inspired many of us and became a textbook example of how best to run a site like this.
There are countless social networking sites and forums out there, but there are very few tight knit communities that make you feel truly connected. MetaFilter did that for me, it was my home on the web.