Twenty years of thesession.org!
Twenty years ago, to the day, I posted the first discussion on thesession.org, “What do you think of the new site?”
https://thesession.org/discussions/1
Technically, The Session existed before that, but it was in a much different form. It didn’t have its own domain name. There were no memberships. It was just me posting a new tune every week. The Internet Archive has a copy of that original version (but with images missing):
https://web.archive.org/web/19991012084228/adactio.com/session/session.shtml
But it was twenty years ago today that The Session became what it is now: a community site, where anyone can post a tune, add a comment, or start a discussion.
The Internet Archive has a copy of that too, but again missing some images:
https://web.archive.org/web/20011130124410/https://thesession.org/
It trundled along for a good few years until the next big change in 2012:
https://thesession.org/discussions/30604
That was when multiple settings for tunes were added, as well as lots of location-based features. And the site underwent quite a big redesign. Since then there have been tweaks and changes, but nothing on that scale.
So, twenty years of contributions by you all to this site works out to:
18,416 tunes with 35,883 different tune settings,
6,835 recordings,
4,599 sessions, 2635 of them currently active,
5,662 events,
366 trips, and
41,724 discussions.
And over the course of those twenty years, there have been 76,500 members and there’s been a total of 754,385 comments.
( If anyone wants to dive into the numbers some more, there are weekly data dumps at https://github.com/adactio/thesession-data )
Words cannot express how much I appreciate all of your contributions. You make this site (and this community) what it is today.
On the web, twenty years is a very long time for anything to stick around. But I’m also confident that we’re just getting started.
Here’s to the next twenty years of thesession.org!