Why Neocities?
Like a lot of people, I find a lot of aspects about the internet as it currently exists
exhausting, to put it bluntly. Endless algorithmically curated content built for the
purpose of keeping users hooked as long as possible to keep generating data and keep
looking at ads, sponsored content disguising ads as user content, and a soulless,
streamlined style that has nearly every website looking virtually identical in what I've
seen eloquently called "the gentrification of the internet." And that's just the user's side
of the coin; as a developer, the eternally-growing set of front-end frameworks and paradigms
has grown to the point of being legitimately suffocating unless you have a development team.
Self-expression drowns between mirror-sheen polished websites, and the massive barrier-to-entry
the amount of labor required for modern websites often requires.
As much as I loathe the fact I'm writing as much of a cliche old-man sentence as this, it wasn't
always like this. When I was younger, the internet was filled with quirky unique personal websites,
small communities that had their own distinct vibe and identity, and all of it as easy to develop as
learning some HTML and Javascript, maybe a little SQL if you're managing a community. It was an internet that
might have been smaller, but felt so much bigger than today's internet, where it feels like a wasteland
beyond about a half-dozen websites, almost all of which are multi-billion dollar megacorporations. You
either migrate to the monolithic megacities of Facebook and Twitter, where all submit to The Mighty
Algorithm, all under an opaque regime whose decisions about what violates their policies seems randomly
decided if not maliciously decided, or you starve in isolation, doomed to a solitary existence without any
interaction with the "outside world."
In this digital wasteland, Neocities is a breath of fresh air. An island refuge from the soulless wasteland
that so much of the internet has devolved into. A place for content unapologetically unique and earnest, not
beholden to the algorithms and aesthetics of major social media platforms. That is something I desperately want
to see once again.