The State of Neocities
Biko Batanari,
May 15, 2023
In the beginning there was Geocities, a platform that allowed everyone to build their own website and make it available to the world for free. It was filled with hundreds of thousands of (usually bad) home pages. Acquired by Yahoo and eventually closed, Geocities faded from the internet long after being abandoned by most of its inhabitants. Then came Neocities, a phoenix rising from the ashes. It's sometimes today thought of as being a part of the indieweb, though the connection is to me a bit hard to draw. But Neocities is dying as well of the same disease that killed Geocities - abandonment and indifference.
Biko Batanari explains, "One possible reason why people don't stick around is not that hard to conclude: HTML and CSS is daunting... The idea of having to learn new skills to do something that you were able to do already (i.e. sharing your stuff) is not going to appeal to everyone... Personal websites have their place, but with the amount of dead sites on Neocities it's clear that many people simply don't have a use for them, no matter how much 'Old Web Movement' stuff gets touted. No matter how good it is to create a personal website, the conclusion is simple: not everyone needs one, wants one, or even should have one. Their needs can be—and are often fulfilled—elsewhere. It's more of a sad fact than something to be bitter about."
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