I've got a few posts on the TODO list, including a 10 year recap with my thoughts on this blog post and the modern web, and an infra talk (I've promised HN I would show how we did our Anycast CDN with our own IP addresses, sorry for the delay).
I'll try not to go to long here, suffice to say I'm a little surprised with my own writings. I did see some existential problems for the internet in terms of culture, but I also felt like a lot of my premonitions were wishful thinking directed towards making the project successful. So it's even been a real shocker for me to see social media (especially Twitter) take a massive nosedive into the dirt over the last few years (which I'm still sad about, I loved old Twitter), and we've seen a quite substantial increase in new sites and traffic in tandem, which has required a lot of thoughtful (and occasionally rash) upgrades to infrastructure. Things overall are going well and I expect that we'll have another solid year here and won't be running into any sustainability issues.
I wanted to thank the HN community once again for your support all these years. HN was our "angel investor", because we received over $20k in donations after we announced on HN, and that was the funding required to get things booted up and running. Without that initial donation push, I'm not sure the platform would have been as successful as it has been. We remain to this day a self-sustaining platform with no needed investment, thanks to Neocities supporters.
And FWIW, I still find the HN community to be the most thoughtful and interesting conversations on the web right now, even when I don't necessarily agree with everyone (or I say something stupid and get deservedly knocked down for it). Thanks for that, too, y'all are amazing and I hope you have a solid 2024.
Thank you for your efforts, I wish you all the best!
Discoverability requires a crawler, a directory, a hot ranking, or randomization.
What is needed is some kind of hybrid wiki/directory that is more than “page of links to good travel blogs.” It needs to be a database that can be navigated with filters and categories. Filter by travel, filter by country. Filter by food, filter by cuisine, filter by reviews or recipes. It needs both hierarchy and dynamicness, but it also can’t be an open ended search or chat that has no inherent navigation. I want to be able to see what exists before searching, and search should be a tool to refine and pare the results.
don't forget webrings!
Most of them are only on here[1] now, or in one of the Flash game archives. I should figure some way to get them up and playable elsewhere again. Been debating getting an itch.io page going or something.
How do you deal with content moderation?
The spammers/native advertisers generating useless content to make a few pennies?
On your own static site all content is written only by you. So there's nothing to moderate.
But people think it's an offense to pay $3 a month for X (Musks insufferableness notwithstanding), so slop is what they shall continue to receive.
There is likely some corner of the internet which is experiencing some of the things we complain about, but neither you, me, or any of us here feel/are invited.
I've been wondering very recently if these social cycles (like fashion, the tech pendulum) are less a cynical play by capitalists and collective amnesia by the young, and more a moral equivalent of molting, where we slough off our old skin and get a chance to grow and be shiny for a bit before everything settles back into normal again. Maybe that's why the other two hominids died out and we remained.
something about it is too modern
The potential for LLMs to generate a lot of problematic crap is certainly there, but I haven't seen this happen yet, don't yet see it as an existential risk to Neocities sites, and if they lead to any new problems, I think we will be able to figure it out.
As for Neocities I happily jumped on as soon as I saw your first post on HN. Sadly I'm not good at creating, more of a programmer so is mostly using it for holding my small link collection to comics so I can update the current reading location. Love the idea and miss the open web dearly. And already 10 years ago? If I wasn't fully aware how hold I am, I would feel old. But what is 10 years? Blink of an eye.
Small, locally run AI will digest and output all content configured perfectly to the users preference. CSS will essentially become a recommendation language for source material at most.
Many benefits will come from this such as solving accessibility permanently or being able to change how you choose to consume content by modifying layout on-demand.
The new goal will not be how to design fun, unique sites — instead simply how fast and easy to get the content up on the net.
The idea that "AI" should be at all necessary for turning a markup language back into a markup language is insane. I really hope you're wrong, but realistically that's the direction it will go!
I wonder how does neocities battle spam/bad actors problem.
edit: but maybe I come as too negative. If neocities are working for someone and bring them joy then good
RE Angelfire, it's actually still a company and still hosts most of the sites that have ever been created there: https://www.angelfire.lycos.com/. You can look around for random sites by using "keyword site:angelfire.com" on google search.
It does remind me of StumbleUpon, a browser addon that would take you to a random website whenever you clicked the button.
Which in turn reminds me of https://wiby.me/surprise/, which takes you to a random 90's style website.
Looks like this is from the dawn of NeoCities.
Edit: 11 years. Give me a break, it's only Jan 4
One quirk that comes to mind is /whatever.html files automatically redirect to /whatever, so I guess you should treat the name without the .html as canonical
It is open source: https://github.com/neocities
Reasonably featureful: https://neocities.org/supporter
I don't use its developer API, but it has one: https://neocities.org/api
It's been a nice place to host a simple static site. On a personal level, I guess I could probably use GitHub pages just as well? I haven't really thought about it, but Neocities occupies a different niche--small, social, especially friendly to people learning about the web--that I've been happy building on.
For anyone like me who has no need for the $5/mo features but wishes to support the project - I now notice they have a page for donations.
Making the web fun again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5957850 - June 2013 (232 comments)
plus a bit:
Making the Web Fun Again (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27192773 - May 2021 (1 comment)
and more generally:
Neocities: A platform that lets you create your own website/follow other's sites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33648618 - Nov 2022 (22 comments)
Neocities showcase – endless source of HTML inspiration - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28953649 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)
Neocities, a 21st century reincarnation of GeoCities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821746 - April 2021 (1 comment)
Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445181 - Jan 2017 (99 comments)
NeoCities can now handle two million web sites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6020776 - July 2013 (98 comments)
NeoCities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724 - June 2013 (209 comments)
This could be a way out: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
Related:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...
https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
I also interviewed Ian Clarke about Freenet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
Here is his latest work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBtyNIqZios
There must be a way to dispense with platforms entirely...
Exactly what I felt when Youtube removed the ability to customize your channel in 2011, deleted my by then fairly large channel in protest (3000 subs in 2011 was alright sized)
> Yahoo! acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.57 billion in bubble stock, and at the time (and perhaps still today) had a toxic approach to acquisitions that would effectively ruin the startups they acquired. Everyone is holding their breath on the Tumblr acquisition to see if they learned their lessons from the previous failures. Hopefully they did.
I come from the future bearing bad news.
The web today is at least partly a trap, and people are flies to be tranquilised, liquidised and digested from the inside out by governments and corporations. At least that is what they think.
We now know about secret courts, that everything is being recorded to be replayed and reanalysed, continuous tracking, etc. It's a gilded cage, there are doughnuts in there, pron, games - lots of flashing lights.
Anyway, if you're in a cage, even a gilded one, it changes behaviour. Similarly, if you're packed into a densely populated urban area your behaviour changes again.
What 'fun' even means to an animal in a cage, in a framework not of their own making, versus what a wild animal thinks is not comparable, not even on the same plane of existence.
