Building my website on Neocities has been some of the most fun I've had on the internet in years.
Yes, it's nostalgic. That feeling of nostalgia is often criticized when one tries to use it as a positive descriptor of something; the so-called rose-tinted glasses, distorting your view of reality. "The grass is always greener to them," they'll think. "They never learned to accept change." Oftentimes, these are fair criticisms. Impressionability, limited emotional development, and later disillusionment with "growing up" cause us to develop irrationally strong attachments to anything we associate with our childhood. However, being a member of the internet that homesteaded Geocities who's still on the internet to this day, I feel as though I'm qualified to speak on what it was like, then versus now.
We lost much, much more in the "transition" to Web 2.0 than many of us even remember having to begin with.
I use the phrase "transition" with caution, because, truthfully, it wasn't a transition. To say that something transitions from one state to another implies that the process is smooth, gradual, and natural, to a degree. Had the internet been left alone by unthinkably large corporate interests, we would have gone happily on for many more years in much the same way we had been. Websites would have continued to be personal, private, and perfect reflections of their creator's will to impart their legacy upon cyberspace, no matter what that legacy may be or what that will may look like. Your existence on the internet did not have to be justified; the fact that you wanted to exist on the internet was its own justification. In a world without the ad giants, technology progresses, and with it image resolutions increase, gif frame counts rise, browser games get more complex. Pages which used to prescribe that they were "best viewed on an 800x600 monitor" increase those numbers every few years.
Instead, the ad giants and other monolithic interests came and rode roughshod over the internet. They are here perfecting the techniques that they have been practicing on us for decades, first in print, then later on the radio and television. They are perfecting them because we permitted them to have their way. We sat back as they turned the internet into their ideal environment, where we resign our private information to them - "voluntarily" or involuntarily - at no cost. Now, we think nothing of the fact that we may have a conversation in person with a friend about buying Valentine's day presents - only to later be shown ads for florists. We pay no mind to the seemingly innocuous "share this on social media" buttons that appear on almost every website - but their very presence makes connections that expand their profile on you, logged in or not1.. Companies are permitted to posture endlessly about how much they "value your privacy", even while they continue to collect what you explicitly do not allow them to (or implicitly did not permit them to) - and, in fact, as they collect more than they divulge in their privacy policies.
Indeed, they "value" our privacy, because we cannot. We do not know what the value of our privacy is. How could we? At every turn it has been hidden from us, obfuscated, handwaved, minimized.
This is the nature of Web 2.0. The ad giants smelled money and moved in, and step zero in turning the internet into their money printer was to monopolize everything. Spend a moment thinking about the social media sites you've signed up for, active or not. Are you representing every part of yourself through your participation? Can your bio, avatar, and banner image paint a complete picture of yourself? Apply this to any social network; the simple answer is they cannot. What can you accomplish on social media? You can of course represent yourself through your posts and images, no matter the format (until you get censored, shadow-banned, found to be violating the ToS...). Some have earnestly been making efforts to make posts and other interactions richer; I'm reminded of the rapid rise of VoIP clients as pseudo-social media. But you must ask yourself, what is driving developers to make their services more feature-rich? Feature-richness requires more bandwidth, which costs money, and we don't pay for our social media experiences.
Of course, no new product development is necessarily altruistic. Firms don't lower the prices of their goods because they care about their customers, they do it because they care about keeping customers - which means cutting prices. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this - in the market for paid goods2.. But all of the top internet services cost us nothing. Improving VoIP codecs and technology, implementing more livestreaming, geotagging, automatically tagging your friends when you post a picture. These features are sold to us as being in our best interest, because it helps the ad giants sell us. Every feature collects more data, richer data. Sites which could previously be considered somewhat "free as in freedom" are gobbled up for their data collection potential. Despite the suite of tools developed to wrest even the slightest bit of privacy back in our hands, it's still inescapable before the might of the ad giants. The only reason we're still being promised spaces to express ourselves for free is because that is part of their plan. Your existence must be justified to them, one way or another.
We focus again on Neocities. No, it is not social media the way we think of it. But it is a way of expressing ourselves online, free (mostly3.) from the prying algorithms, advertisements, and "share this" buttons that pursue us across cyberspace. For one, this means no one need worry so much about what too-specific ad they're going to see tomorrow after adding a new page to your site. We need not ponder the moral questions of supporting, implicitly or explicitly, the corporations that stole the internet from us and convinced us that we were going to be better for it. Page by page, we can begin to reclaim what has been lost.
Admittedly, my reasons for joining Neocities are not entirely so noble, nor must yours be. I started off by saying how fun an experience making my website has been, and I mean that. Your website can look however you want it to. For some, that will mean working within the restrictions to make something that any web user today would consider beautiful. For others, our sites of old from the platform's namesake are perfect inspiration. Who cares about best practices? Who cares if iframes and blinking gifs everywhere are "obnoxious"?4. Experiment!
Learn HTML and CSS, play around in it, and don't stop until you're happy. Come back and learn new techniques when you have a sweet new idea. Throw together a page with no purpose other than to make an obscure reference or a silly joke. Make a long ass page dedicated to anything you find interesting or are passionate about. (Seriously, I've seen amateur and professional photography, angel gifs, teddy bears, outdated technology, painted art...) Start writing articles about anything that strikes your enthusiasm, or contribute to the world an unabridged resource in whatever your expertise is. Check out sites cooler than yours and steal their code. Stick it all in your website and make it your digital commonplace book5.. Really express yourself, in a way that an avatar, a profile banner, and some shortform posts never could.
You'll discover, soon, that stumbling upon a website is more rewarding than having an account automatically recommended to you through algorithms. You aren't finding a profile, you're finding someone's passion project of potentially many dozens of hours. Their enthusiasm will rub off on you, because it's so much easier to be genuinely enthusiastic about something with your own website than it is on social media. You, too, will make a website you're enthusaistic about and happy to work on, and your visitors will be inspired in turn by your passion project of potentially many dozens of hours.
So go out there. Discover what it means to be a cypherpunk, a Discordian, a pagan, a y2k fashionista, a gothic horror fan, an interactive fiction author, an amateur webdev.
Then steal their fucking code, because their site was dope and you deserve a sick looking page, too.
2019
Postscript
1. Hard Questions: What Data Does Facebook Collect When I'm Not Using Facebook, and Why? (CAUTION: Links to Facebook) Go back
2. I believe that our conversation regarding consumerism has very little nuance to it. I think the assertion that "consumerism is evil" is, without more behind it, an incomplete thought, metaphorically speaking. It certainly is a matter that we should grapple with, but my point in writing this is not to convince you that consumerism is or is not evil. It is rather, in part, to show that gross violations of our privacy are abject enough on their own, regardless of their purpose. It should not matter if your data is being stolen to build an advertising profile, a government profile, or anything else, the privacy violations are always wrong. Go back
3. Although Neocities itself is free (BSD 2-clause license) and open source, I highly recommend including a robots.txt file in the root directory of your website, which disallows (honest) webcrawlers and other automated web robots from accessing your website. Not all web robots are configured to respect robots.txt files in subdomains, so the actual privacy gained by doing this is arguable, but there is no reason not to implement it. Go back
4. I will concede that iframes are horrendous for any website's accessibility. It is no small secret that even in their heyday, iframes were much detested. Do consider this before including them in your website. Go back
5. Commonplace books are a relatively ancient (~17th century) practice in which one kept an empty journal somewhere to fill with whatever knowledge they found interesting, handy, or just felt like writing down. They're making somewhat of a comeback as people rediscover the concept through keeping a planner or a bullet journal, though definitely distinct from planners and journals alike. Read more about them here or go back