We should run it off the South American electric showerheads in honor of your shower browsing.
Yeah, they treat Neocities as social community, rather than just a hosting service like Geocities and the like were. And part of that is the fault of Neocities itself, for allowing you to "follow" people's sites and leave comments for them. At this point, it's basically another social media platform LARPing as a website host. In that sense, many of the websites truly are glorified social media profiles.
I agree that Neocities is a valuable service that helps non-technical people escape the walled gardens of social media. The editing tools in the browser, frontend learning resources, and gallery features are great for newbs. I'd say that outsourcing the search engine to DuckDuckGo is amateurish for a paid Rails product, but that's my only real gripe with the product or its developer, who seems like a reasonably cool digital archivist.
Yeah, thanks for reminding me about the learning curve for some of this stuff. It's easy to forget that if you sit a normie down at a Linux CLI and tell them, "you can do anything," they'll often never start. Setting up a WordPress site from scratch is an achievable task with a useful end result that'll teach you a ton along the way. Then you'll realize that you really can do anything: VPN, email, calendar, chat, mailing lists, forums, media servers, game servers, anything you've ever seen online becomes within reach because you have total control.
Same here, the sheer amount of uninspired trash on the internet is a buzzkill. I've had the privilege to work for an innovative company with lots of soul, and like to think the same of my side project, but most of the paid work is for people with such groundbreaking ideas as starting yet another CRM or social network. What else can I do but work for a wage and continue learning as I draw inspiration from whatever cool concepts, technologies, and design elements I see executed well online? Even in another field, that knowledge and curiosity will serve me well, and nobody can take it away.
Oh agreed. And this is something that’s really fallen by the wayside in the modern internet, where it seems like everyone either has a degree in web development, or knows nothing beyond social media platforms.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was. According to the rules you can't mention JK Rowling or Harry Potter on the site. Merely mentioning Rowling is enough to make most troons start squealing and fuming in anger.
I really don't mind rules that discourage controversial topics if the devs don't want constant flamewars to deal with. Especially when there could be kids around. It is a slippery slope because people can leverage it to go beyond the political shit like in that case.
It's because it's so forced. I say the same thing about modern games that try to do a retro aesthetic, it always comes off as trying to mimic the real thing. Back when people used those "aesthetics", it was because they had no choice because of the limitations of the time. The people that made the best webpages probably were teenagers or moms that checked out a book about HTML from the library. People didn't have the creative liberty to use all the fancy tools and most of the copycats are just copying the main attributes that give it the look, without knowing the reason behind why they were the way they were.
Before 2016, Neocities was a pretty chilled out place to host a small personal website and it was primarily populated by autistic millenials and people who just wanted somewhere to learn HTML and maybe show off what they managed to put together. Most sites on NC weren't weird faux-Geocities sites, weirdly enough. Most of them were weird art sites, little project pages, a shit load of tranime fanpages like fauux (strobing lights), and a small handful of oldschool style personal websites that were actually pretty authentic looking and not just low-effort garbage.
Any site like that on neocities is definitely just some teenager larping as a schizo. Real schizos are on Telegram, niche forums, or are self-hosting their site (bonus if it's a .onion).
I have ran into a couple by looking at the newest and updated pages, but I didn't bookmark them. They're rare little gems that get buried beneath the teenage gender stuff and are generally impossible to find otherwise because they don't tag their site in the neocities search engine. They also aren't obvious until you click on them, like many sites of old like Time Cube.
