Neocities (disclosure: I work on it) has taken steps to try to improve small personal web site discoverability, which ends up being like a platform for people making web sites with a hybrid social component https://neocities.org
I like the idea of calling this the small web, I usually go with something like "personal web site" or "home pages" but it's never quite stuck for me. I hope they've added Neocities to the Kagi small web search because there's some pretty incredible sites available for that and our compiled sitemap will make importing easy: https://neocities.org/browse
The framing for this stuff is usually something like "wow remember the crazy 90s web" nostalgia pieces or "this is an active resistance against Facebook come join us in the lonely space nobody goes to." But really there's some incredible, magical content that requires the canvas the web provides, that isn't on the social media super-platforms and people very much still use the web to access them. Neocities alone serves hundreds of millions of views per month across all the sites, there's still a lot of web surfing going on.
I would actually argue that having a web site gives you more exposure for your content than an average social media account, because sans a few lucky accounts, most are being throttled and limited by weird algorithms to prevent people from seeing your content organically. Your google search ranking might not be great, but people share links all over the place, including in private channels (think Slack/Discord/IRC/IMs) and you can still get meaningful distribution of your content this way.
To paraphrase @izs "if you build it, they will come", is a misquote from a Kevin Costner movie about baseball ghosts, but if you build a good site with good content, people do just magically show up through mechanisms I don't myself quite understand yet. It's pretty cool to see new sites on Neocities that are unusually interesting and know they'll organically get view counts into the millions before it happens.
If you look at this story from anyone else’s perspective, right up until the last few moments this is a story about a man with untreated schizophrenia or temporal lobe seizures escalating his illness to the point of kidnapping someone and transporting them across state lines.
Almost every company in the dot com boom was convinced the headlights at the end of their story would be vindication, not the ambulance coming to take them to a psychiatric ward. Almost all of them were wrong.
My mentor who inspired me to be an entrepreneur was diagnosed with schizophrenia and is basically spending the rest of his life in hospital…
I really think there’s something in schizophrenia beyond the illness. A lot People with it normally get symptoms around 27-28 but achieve insane amounts before then (same as my mentor)
> I really think there’s something in schizophrenia beyond the illness.
I don't think there needs to be any special association. "Predisposed to schizophrenia" necessarily implies "not neurotypical", and the outcome distribution for individuals who are not neurotypical is much, much broader than neurotypical.
The pinnacle of success in society has a pronounced overrepresention of neurodivergence, in the same way that pro athletes as a group have freak physical genetics.
But I would expect that there are equally many people predisposed to schizophrenia who, rather than overachieving prior to symptom onset, end up dysfunctional and battling a variety of substance addictions.
(and also I'd expect that the relative probability of these outcomes is highly affected by the strength of support networks and socioeconomic status)
I had an episode of delusional schizophrenia in my early 20s and luckily haven't relapsed. No hallucinations, just started to think everything was secretly talking about me or to me.
My pet theory is something like, my brain's dials for "avoid risk" and "recognize patterns" are turned up too high. So I breezed through a software engineering degree without ever partying, but I spend a lot of my time sitting in my house unable to motivate myself to go outside, and I'm not very empathetic (other people's words) and not very outgoing.
It's not that schizophrenia makes you smart, but that "smart" and "schizophrenic" are both functions of some high-dimensional space, and the same underlying differences can easily cause both.
On the other side, I have an elder relative who has paranoid schizophrenia and below normal IQ. Us in the tech industry are definitely going to get survivor bias from the "Beautiful Mind" cases around us.
And of course sometimes you meet those people who are smart, beautiful, rich, and friendly, with no downsides, and all you can think is ... "You son of a bitch" :P
"Recognize patterns" on high is usually an asset in our line of work.
After reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix I wondered how many of {Cantor, Frege, Gödel, Hilbert, Moore, Poincaré, Russel, Turing, Whitehead, Wittgenstein} would —given a modern DX— have been said to be "on the spectrum".
Some were wrong, but plenty were simply ahead of their time, at least from the perspective of the internet "fad" becoming a ubiquitous mainstream phenomenon.
Sure, looking back some of the ideas look silly. But when you look at where were are today and the wide range of what's popular and sustainable, some of that looks silly as well.
I just deployed to my neocities site then came and saw this comment :D
I almost got off of NeoCities recently because I thought I wanted to start adding dynamic parts to my website, but as history has shown me, whenever I start doing that I fall down a rabbit hole and get nothing done. So I buckled down and figured out how to overcome some stuff that was driving me nuts about Hugo and I'm back at it!
NeoCities definitely has a yonger-feeling crowd for the most part, but I quite like it. It's nice having the feed and discovering all the weird stuff people put on their sites. It does very well at bringing back the feeling of GeoCities. I also love how someone brought back the 88x31 buttons!
I also really appreciate the Sinatra + Sequel backend :)
I really like the stuff happening over at neocities :-)
Out of curiosity, do you make any metadata available? Would be a very interesting resource to have, working on making the rest of the web discoverable as well ...
> but if you build a good site with good content, people do just magically show up through mechanisms
This hasn't been true for a long time, thanks to social media downranking posts with external links, and Google downranking any site that doesn't post daily updates or heaven forbid, doesnt have SSL enabled.
A good site with good content takes time and effort to produce. And even then it will simply act as a feeder for people who will regurgitate the same information in simplified terms on a content blog (without a backlink of course) or social media. Worst case scenario, they'll try to productize that knowledge that was made available for free.
After this happens enough times, people simply stop maintaining those sites.
Is it possible to upload pages to neocities programmatically? I know you have a Ruby-based program to do so, but can i do it by ftp, http, or something similar?
The reason i ask is I've written (in Python) wiki software catwiki[1] that allows you to write wiki pages in Markdown. At some point I'd like to extend the program to generate a static site based on the contents of the wiki, and it would be nice to be able to automatically upload it to neocities.
What I put on facebook is the type of thing I don't want to get wide reach. I don't want just anyone to see pictures of my kids - that is semi private information that I only want my friends and family to see (and you don't want to see them anyway because you don't know me)
> What I put on facebook is the type of thing I don't want to get wide reach. I don't want just anyone to see pictures of my kids - that is semi private information that I only want my friends and family to see (and you don't want to see them anyway because you don't know me)
That's a different use case than what the GP is describing. Many people use social media, including Facebook, as a platform to build an audience of strangers.
I like the idea of calling this the small web, I usually go with something like "personal web site" or "home pages" but it's never quite stuck for me. I hope they've added Neocities to the Kagi small web search because there's some pretty incredible sites available for that and our compiled sitemap will make importing easy: https://neocities.org/browse
The framing for this stuff is usually something like "wow remember the crazy 90s web" nostalgia pieces or "this is an active resistance against Facebook come join us in the lonely space nobody goes to." But really there's some incredible, magical content that requires the canvas the web provides, that isn't on the social media super-platforms and people very much still use the web to access them. Neocities alone serves hundreds of millions of views per month across all the sites, there's still a lot of web surfing going on.
I would actually argue that having a web site gives you more exposure for your content than an average social media account, because sans a few lucky accounts, most are being throttled and limited by weird algorithms to prevent people from seeing your content organically. Your google search ranking might not be great, but people share links all over the place, including in private channels (think Slack/Discord/IRC/IMs) and you can still get meaningful distribution of your content this way.
To paraphrase @izs "if you build it, they will come", is a misquote from a Kevin Costner movie about baseball ghosts, but if you build a good site with good content, people do just magically show up through mechanisms I don't myself quite understand yet. It's pretty cool to see new sites on Neocities that are unusually interesting and know they'll organically get view counts into the millions before it happens.