- Joined
- Feb 2, 2023
- Highlight
- #1
Have you ever wanted to relive the good ol' days of the internet?
The days back when, if you were online, most of what you saw consisted of personal websites filled with flashing gifs and really obnoxious pop-up ads? The days of Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod?
Well, too bad.
The days back when, if you were online, most of what you saw consisted of personal websites filled with flashing gifs and really obnoxious pop-up ads? The days of Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod?
Well, too bad.
Welcome to Neocities- the site where old web design meets new-age insanity.
Prepare to have your pleasant memories of yesteryear tarnished beyond repair.
Section 1: What the fuck am I looking at?
Neocities is, to quote its landing page, a site-hosting service dedicated to "bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web". To that end, it's a service that allows you to sign up and host a free website on its servers. Prepare to have your pleasant memories of yesteryear tarnished beyond repair.
Section 1: What the fuck am I looking at?
Each free account is entitled to 1GB worth of space and one domain name, and to earn any more of each you need to upgrade to a "Supporter" by paying 5 dollars a month for 50GB of space. There's nothing inherently wrong with that- and Neocities itself isn't really the issue, more so the people who use it.
If, by your question, you were referring to that portrait up there, it's of your average Neocities user. A non-binary, trans, aromantic cuddling enthusiast with an entire page dedicated to explaining how much he doesn't want to have sex and how much of a girl he is. (Here's some archive links for those pages in case he ever DFE's.)
By the way, when I say average, I mean average. This guy is one of the most normal people I could find on that entire site (of those who've made functioning webpages)- especially its largest group.
Buckle your fuckle. This thread is going to make you wish tumblr had never died.
Section 2: Webrings and the Wonderful People who Join Them
As one may expect, Neocities attracts the kind of people looking to bring back the past- but only in the most literal and superficial of ways. Eye-bleeding visuals, endless buttons and gifs, and shrine pages are abundant here, but you won't be seeing too many dedicated forums or attempts at community. These sites are all about me, me, me.Section 2: Webrings and the Wonderful People who Join Them
Or, well, the webmasters who run them.
Beyond the sites, though, there are three main forms of communication on Neocities.
The first is the Profile system on Neocities itself, where you can comment on or follow other sites' pages. Same goes for any comment section or guestbook willingly implemented by a webmaster on their page via Disqus or some other service. These are usually harmless, especially since Neocities is a MASSIVE echo chamber, but still worth mentioning.
The second type is through an external site like the very few forums that do exist (the most notable ones are the Melonland and Yesterweb forums) or "alternative" social media- which many of these webmasters swear "isn't like those other social medias where corporations spy on you", because they're made by extremist start-ups who thought Twitter was too tame! These sites are almost always one of the following: Cohost, Spacehey, Mastodon, Buzzly.art, or any of the mainstream sites (most frequently tumblr, instagram, or twitter). We'll discuss this one later.
The third and final type is through webrings. That's right- one of the only interactive elements of the old web that's resurfaced in this pit has been the practice of creating webrings around specific things and using them to heavily promote other sites.
Sounds great, doesn't it? Yeah, it does! I wonder what subjects these webrings revolve around?
Ah.
Fascinating.
And here's the part where I clarify what I meant by "new-age insanity".
Neocities is absolutely infested by tumblrites.
And not just your average Twitter user either- oh, no. As you might've guessed from my social media comment earlier, these are the people that Twitter was too tame for. These are the kinds of utter lunatics who show up in trashy documentaries and would've been absolutely blasted by people like Leafy or Ricegum 7 years ago for being absolute freaks. These are the kinds of people this site was made for.
Ah.
Fascinating.
And here's the part where I clarify what I meant by "new-age insanity".
Neocities is absolutely infested by tumblrites.
And now, a minute sampling of what neocities webrings have to offer:
- A "lesbian, feminist" webring made up almost entirely of transgender men.
- A cuddler's webring consisting of people who are "cuddling enthusiasts". Founded by the true and honest womxn pictured earlier and currently hosting 27 members.
- At least three separate webrings dedicated solely to "being queer" and nothing else. Most contain multiple minors.
- An autistic webring almost certainly made up of total pretenders. Their join rules outright state that diagnosis status doesn't matter, and defining Asperger's in any way is against their code of conduct. Founded by a deranged nutcase with
self pronouns. Rabies pride makes me think it might be a joke, but... - An entire webring called "transing the internet" which connects the ENORMOUS "trans" community on the site. Hosted by and mostly made up of minors. Their members page is currently broken, but their rules page is not. | EDIT 9/20/2023: THE MEMBERS PAGE HAS NOW BEEN FIXED.
- A huge "alterhuman" webring that's elitist about "kinning" and includes literal porn sites alongside minors. Has 56 members.
And what do we know goes hand-in-hand with gardening, "queerness", and programming? Why, radical left-wing discourse, of course!
Section 3: Owning the Libs by Doing Exactly what They're Doing while Quoting Marx and Crossdressing
It's no secret that tumblr was an extremely left-leaning platform. Extremist, even. And yet, it had small sects of it that were even more extreme than what you typically think of. Absolute fucking nutters who genuinely think that China in the 1970s was a better society than 2020s America because an old, 12-hour film made by two very rich communists was apparently more accurately representative of life in the country than the endless amounts of documentation detailing how shitty a place it was to live in. This is the type of people who inhabit this website.
This type of thought is extremely commonplace across all of Neocities, but especially in the now-defunct Yesterweb Forums that most active webmasters dwelled in.
The forums were a wonderful place where great thinkers came to discuss how all it takes to stop AI from stealing their jobs is to unionize, kids should go to school less (or not at all), and how much better the internet would be if it was funded by communists instead of capitalists. I'm speaking in past tense because, to my great relief, the place was shut down on May 1st and has since been deleted*.
*has not actually been deleted. The deadline for deletion has come and gone and the forum remains accessible in read-only form. UPDATE 8/9/2023: The forum is still up in read-only mode. I doubt it's being deleted any time soon.
I've archived almost all of the forums here (main forum), here ("The Gazebo"), here ("Computer Lab"), and here ("The Garden"). Most threads are very short (less than 10 surpass two pages), but there's a whole host of them dedicated to discussing how great the world would be if capitalism didn't exist and sharing contact info that I'll have linked at the bottom of this OP (since there's a lot of threads and I don't want to clog this paragraph up). Almost every single member also wrote a manifesto to prove their loyalty, all of which you can read here.
"But why are there so many threads about contact info," you may be asking, "if this is supposed to be like the old internet? All of these people have abandoned social media- shouldn't there only be one or two threads for aggregating their sites and emails?"
Au contraire, dear reader! You must remember- these people only want to return to the old web in the most shallow and surface-level ways possible! Actually getting offline is hardly what they're after!
And so, almost all of these people still have social media- they just have social media on even more niche and even more radical networks. Instead of Twitters, they have Mastodons. Instead of tumblrs, they have Spaceheys. There aren't too many of these platforms between all of them, either- maybe 5 sites in total that they all share, and most are made by small-time tech start-ups.
Sound familiar?
Nah, it shouldn't. These people rescinded Social Media, after all. There's no way they'd just lie about it like that.
Section 4: That Other Section about Individual People that I Couldn't Make a Good Segue Into
Now then, that's nice and all, but this is Kiwifarms. This is a place where retarded people go to laugh at even-more retarded people who sperg out at you for calling them a faggot instead of just calling you a faggot back. Where are the cows? Where are the Interesting Individuals that would make this network of sites so interesting to browse in the first place?Man, you shouldn't've asked.
A (very) small list of some Interesting Individuals inhabiting the Neonet:
- To begin with, sadgrl.online is the main person behind this entire movement. She is an avowed communist with an entire hidden site dedicated to "crushing capitalism" by unlearning internalized capitalism, as well as the aforementioned huge forum dedicated to "exposing" big social networks (while using Discord) and whatever else they feel like talking about. Ragequit the web on May 1st, 2023, shut down her Webring and Discord around the same time (as well as the forums later on), and wrote a 19-chapter summary of what she felt went wrong. Includes a hilarious section where she defines good ettiquette and includes "not misconstruing other peoples' viewpoints" before immediately launching into a lengthy rant about how transphobes are all spouting hate speech and should not be listened to.
- Sadness' partner in crime, Madness, is another notable figure. She's a self-described "digital guerilla" who co-opted the Yesterweb movement and turned it from the nostalgiafagging that it originally was into the extremely radical left-wing movement it became. Too lazy to make her own website- instead, she shat out a massive "Proletarian Library" where she just barfs up PDFs of extremely radical Marxist-Leninist or Maoist books and set about alienating everyone she deemed "bourgeoise" from the forums. This hilariously included artists (by banning commission advertising), actual legitimate programmers who worked in IT (because they dared to do white-collar work), and- eventually- literally fucking everyone by trying to ban linking your site on the forums whatsoever (citation needed). The main mongoloid responsible for turning Neocities into a leftist shell stuffed to the brim with barebones websites that have nothing more than an About page and Manifesto on them.
- "Bisexualgender self-shipper" who is legitimately insane. Ships herself in various forms (archive which is purely visual and doesn't work) with a shit load of characters, but mainly Ianto Jones from Torchwood (a Dr Who spin-off). Has an entire page dedicated to self-inserts she ships with canon characters of shows (sometimes multiple at a time) and used to have a landing page that assaulted your eyeballs with a drawing of her kissing her fictional husband.
- Fat dude who claims to be a polyamorous system, as well as disabled. Despite this, he writes like a completely normal person and his selfie is of him standing with 0 issues nor showing any bodily harm besides that which he can inflict upon others with his massive weight. Dropped out of community college to focus on "trauma recovery". This system also includes a literal baby who likes "being touched" and something called a "hepian" that really just looks like a mermaid from space. Not a single member of the system is male.
- Autistic fictionkin (purely visual archive) who has admitted to being put in a mental hospital ("multiple times, actually!") and brags about having a(n unnamed) conspiracy-theorist uncle. "Alterhuman", lists her tv tropes on her about page and uses "he / moon / bun / fae / she pronouns". Button/gifs page is about as one would expect.
- "Otherkin system" who's into soul-bonding and genuinely believes she's not human. Has a "werecard" that describes her "demon form" and the various "parallel lives" that she's connected to. Also provides a description of her human appearance- short, brown-haired, "gender-neutral" with acne into her 20s.
- Lesbian porn artist, married to a wife, has 10 (arguably 27) pets and an absolute obsession with Willem Dafoe. The webmaster has apparently considered Dafoe extremely sexy since she was 9, and has an entire page dedicated to rating his sex scenes. Ships abuse victims with their abusers and teenagers with adults.
- "Sapphist gentleman" who goes by zie/zir pronouns. Spends 1/3 of his About page explaining what those are and how to use them. Anarcho-communist; runs the queer archives that (at the moment) are mostly empty. What it does have, however, consists almost exclusively of explicit and vulgar guides to having sex. The webmaster actively recommends these to minors (15-17).
- Transgender clown (purely visual archive) who doesn't like kids and is under 18. Mostly just here as a good example of the typical user of this whole site. Note the extremely low conscientiousness and emotional stability scores on her quiz results.
- (As far as I can tell) anonymous cuntwaffle who put up a DIY HRT recipe without disclaimer nor deterrent. Tries to save face by claiming that it shouldn't be done at home... before going on to give extremely detailed step-by-step instructions and complaining about how hormones are too expensive and hard to access. Personal site is yet to be found, but you bet your ass it's getting linked here if it ever is.
Seriously, this is the tip of the tip of the iceberg. One thing this site does very well is recreate that rabbit-hole feeling of falling down site after site after site, watching the absolute insanity escalate from a trans teenager or two into a full-on demisexual genderqueer whose pronouns include onomatopoeia and furbies in them. Shit's ridiculous, and ridiculously entertaining
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