I'm always surprised by the creativity of these personal websites. The web is so utilitarian and marketing oriented that I forget that a web page is a blank canvas ready for artistic expression.
If Neocities captured the Geocities / Angelfire vibes of 1995 - 2001, then Nekoweb captures the budding anime / early Millennial vibe of 2000 - 2006. This was right around the time that Xanga, LiveJournal, and the rest started peeling apart the indie web.
And by the time Facebook started growing, it was game over.
It feels harder every day to not despise the march of technological progress. There are so many eras of computing and internet that I would've loved to see elongated by 10+ years. Then, at least, we would've had more time to get tired of them. Instead, it feels like we're stuck wondering what we lost, in what feels like a very boring and much less fulfilling internet full of SPAM, bots, manipulation, endless pointless culture wars.
Don't get me wrong either, I think computers today are amazing, probably too amazing to be comprehended, but it leaves little to the imagination. You'd think the ubiquitous access to production-quality creativity and development software for free or cheap with commodity computers that are within the reach of many people across the world would be a fantastic outcome that would lead to a Cambrian explosion of creativity. If the era that desktop towers and Flash Player had engendered was great, you'd expect the era after it to be even more wild. Instead though, it's hard to feel that way. Surely the floor and ceiling of production value have raised a bit, but as people in the retro computing and demoscene niches have no doubt taken notice of, limitations breed creativity, and you lose some of that in a world where the capabilities and access have gotten so good. Sure, indie games are in a decent state, but nobody is going to miss the era of Steam Greenlight the way they miss Newgrounds. And if that didn't hurt enough, Internet creativity was at first enriched, then choked out by monetization, as YouTube elevated and then destroyed the prospects of animators on the platform, putting a disgraceful end to the era of Internet animation that proceeded it. Monetization continues to be a rocky road for legitimate creators and a lucrative pay-day for scammers who just steal things and monetize them. The internet, of course, got choked out by corporations and bad actors who realized it was a cheap way to reach a very large amount of people; and now it's not.
I think the surest sign that computers are not exciting anymore is the gradual decline of the software on it. Sure, there's tons of amazing software, but people dread the new updates. How will Firefox tabs get even dumber and uglier? How will Windows become even brazenly more malicious to the user? Which program that I paid for will turn into a subscription product that I can no longer buy new versions of? Software has stagnated, and now a lot of it is pure rent-seeking garbage. What's not is aimlessly redesigning things in an attempt to be "fresh" and "exciting" but people realize that making their browser tabs less legible while taking up more screen space is not fresh or exciting or an improvement of any kind, because end-users are not impressed by your Dribbble, they are trying to use their computer.
No surprise that it's fun to go back and pretend you're on the scrappy Internet that once was, writing dumb web pages in HTML. It feels like something that would've been taken away from us if there was a way for it to be.
This is a major depressive thought of mine; that computers and the internet started as this wild west in which capitalism didn't have a hold, because information that can be infinitely copied cannot have value, but capitalism being extremely adaptive at infecting everything and anything turned it into bland corporate soup, and will continue to do so until every personal terminal is a dumb remote access screen that streams rendered frames from The Cloud and it won't even be a general-purpose computer anymore, much less be capable of running what you want.
Today I'm 25, which puts me at older gen Z, younger millennial, which should have given me the experiences of the time when I was a teenager or kid, but by some cruel twist of fate, I keep discovering things from that time that I wasn't aware of that I still think are incredible as concepts, but make no sense in the modern world beyond being toys.
I think it has less to do with corporations, and more to do with youth culture and us getting old. The internet has more on it than ever, you just need to know where to look. Yes, Newgrounds is dead, but big YouTube animators still exist, and there are still indie game communities like itch.io. But just like my Dad was uninterested in my video games, I find myself uninterested in the stuff kids do these days. I think there is just a nostalgia factor that draws us to stuff like Nekoweb.
Yes, there is a nostalgia factor, but the twist of fate is that it is nostalgia for things I never had. I was never on myspace or geocities or my regional equivalent skyblog. And yet I am nostalgic for it, because the current modern alternatives are profiles on social media.
Modern software development is such dogshit, my 2008 Mac Pro that can encode MP3s at 80x can't even run a damn music player anymore.
The player doesn't do anything new, of course. It was just built in a ridiculous fashion by developers who prioritise their own convenience over everything else.
> Nekoweb is a free static website hosting service, created in 2024 by a group of coders, programmers and artists, passionate for the old web and personal websites.
> Join us on our discord to chat with the community and the developers!
Gating discussion of the open web in a proprietary service is an interesting decision. Shows that we're still far too reliant on closed protocols for even smaller nontrivial tasks like making a message board.
Haha I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed the irony. It really devalues the whole thing. The next phase in online consumer culture will certainly be the commodification of the old web: reduced to a performative aesthetic, divorced from its original substance.
What irony? It is made for the artistic look and feel of websites as they once were. Seems to have nothing to do with the "open web" as you might like to put it.
I really don't get the discord phenomena, it seems like more bloatware and demands on attention and notifications - I mean - IRC is right there and you can at least control your own attention span however you want.
I didn't get it either. At first. Then I had a reason to use it.
I am a long time IRC user, and still use that to this day, but in a much less frequent capacity. IRC is a comparative ghost town when thrown up against Discord.
Part of the reason for that is accessibility. Discord does everything IRC does in terms of channels, bots, etc, but packages it in a UI that the masses can easily consume. The addition of voice without having to run Teamspeak or something alongside like we did back in the day. A stable mobile app brings it all together in a portable, easy-to-use package.
I resisted it for awhile, with my younger friends adopting it fairly quickly. Then small businesses and we apps started using it and suddenly half the things I interacted with on a daily basis had their own Discord server. So, I broke rank and tried it
What I found were a few key communities relevant to my interests that were having actual neverending conversations about this I like. Compared to IRC, where response time can be days for any type of question, and that's if someone is in the mood to be friendly instead of crufty. This is the primary reason why I stay in Discord and IRC is just sort of collecting dust in my world. The community either aged out or just became so jaded that they made it inhospitable.
Had the same experience more or less. I was on IRC during 9/11, and many other major world events, and it's key to my online experiences back in the day, but these days I haven't used it in almost a year. I moved to Slack over a decade ago, for business, introducing it to where I was working at the time, and then five years ago or so, moved to Discord for the community aspect.
These days it's almost primarily all on Discord. There are a lot of features that I don't use, but it's what Slack should have been, back when Slack was meant to replace IRC. The interface works, it's available on my phone, it has call ability, multiple servers within my account and no need to keep a bouncer running.
Your mention of being on IRC during 9/11 brings back memories. I happened to have taken a sick day and was home watching the news when the first tower fell.
I immediately got on EFNet where I knew a few people that worked for CNN and CNBC at the time. We'd usually get together and talk old broadcasting/radio tech, but not that day.
My close friends and I have a Discord server that we interact on regularly and I've actually looked at switching us over to irc, since I like open, self-hostible standards with competing servers and clients better than proprietary software, but there were a couple reasons that the switch would be unsatisfying for us.
First, with Discord if you aren't online for awhile you don't have to miss the conversations that happened while you were offline — you can just read them later. Whereas with IRC, you will absolutely have to miss everything you are not online for, which creates a much larger fear of missing out, without any benefit in not being distracted or whatever since you can (and I do) just turn off all notifications that aren't direct pings in Discord so you can just check the app whenever you feel like it. So Discord has all the benefits of not getting notifications while you're offline, with none of the downsides of literally missing out on important discussions between your friends where they might have been pouring their heart out with no one currently on the server or whatever.
Second, Discord just has a lot more features that we actually really like using. Maybe that's "bloatware" to you, but the purpose of software is to have features users use. For instance, embedded images and gifs, custom emojis, the possibility of having voice channels and sharing your screen, and stuff like that. Having custom emojis is actually a pretty great way to expand your expressivity and have really fun in jokes and losing that is actually pretty sad.
Third, like the other commenters have said, the Discord servers for stuff I care about are actually active and friendly and interesting.
Finally, although you could make an IRC interface that works like the Discord app, which happens to be my favorite layout for a chat app that I've ever used, I don't think anyone has to my knowledge.
We ended up going with an open source clone of Discord called revolt, which I developed a custom Android application for.
Side note; you can disable all notifications or be selective about the ones you receive, like most apps. The idea of being bombarded with pings is not really a thing that happens unless you are a dev and forgot to disable that on your server.
This reads like you're part of the salty thugs that killed IRC to begin with. Offer zero help because you built some mythos about being self-taught and think everyone else should suffer the same, ejaculating "RTFM!" every chance you get, your biggest gripe ultimately distilling down to whining about change, an inevitable outcome of progress that you spite for the simple reason that you liked how "the way things were" denied use to a lot of people who were not as technically proficient. That attitude is the problem, not the solution. Make no mistake.
Stay in the cave and be quiet, or step out into the light abd be helpful. Those are your choices.
We have conventions and protocols for dealing with text before - discord is some platform it will bring a whole bunch of new conventions and protocols - needlessly complicated and just a waste of human energy and time - but you know - maximize "engagement" or what have you for your KPI metrics - it's like selling water in bottles to people with easy access to drinking water.
This reads like you're part of the salty thugs that killed IRC to begin with. Offer zero help because you built some mythos about being self-taught and think everyone else should suffer the same, ejaculating "RTFM!" every chance you get, your biggest gripe ultimately distilling down to whining about change, an inevitable outcome of progress that you spite for the simple reason that you liked how "the way things were" denied use to a lot of people who were not as technically proficient. That attitude is the problem, not the solution. Make no mistake.
Stay in the cave and be quiet, or step out into the light and be helpful. Those are our choices.
They're not instant-messaging platforms. Though it's true that Discord often gets misused as a permanent knowledge-base (where a forum would be much better)
Does Nekoweb declare to be part of the open web? Seems more like the artistic feel for websites as they used to be. Not a very valid argument in that context.
Nobody is talking about IP here, it's about using standard and open protocols. HN and Nekoweb are both proprietary services, that's fine, but they run on HTTP and the only thing you need to interact with it is a web browser of some sort, whereas nekoweb's discord “server” relies on a third party (Discord) and uses a nonstandard closed protocol.
Discord runs in the browser, same as HN. And the HTTP APIs they use aren't officially documented (except HN's read-only ones via Firebase and Algolia) (though both are easily reverse engineered and OSS frontends exist). There's not much difference.
The big difference is that Discord is a third party here. Nekoweb, like HN, could implement their own first party forum, but instead rely on a centralized third party from which they cannot migrate. It's very far from the “passionate for the old web and personal websites” stance they are marketing in their pitch.
Also AFAIK you cannot be banned from HN for using the API, whereas Discord will ban you for any “misuse”. You also don't need to be logged-in to access HN, which is also indexable by search engines, whereas Discord isn't.
By your reasoning, any backend that’s not accessible directly by the user is proprietary. HN would then also be proprietary, because it relies on a third party (HN) and uses a nonstandard closed protocol (this comment section). Any website that stores data and exposes it via their own UI is proprietary (I leave this vague on purpose, as it is up to interpretation). Discord can be run in the browser and is accessible via APIs. I think it’s as open as any other web app by a company that has a commercial interest.
Services like Discord have lowered the entry barrier for non-technical conversation and community-building online. It certainly seems to be polarizing. I’ve noticed a lot of my friends and colleagues either embrace it or despise it. I wouldn’t mind an open-source alternative to it, but with the extensive features that it offers that’s hard to achieve.
> By your reasoning, any backend that’s not accessible directly by the user is proprietary
I've never said such thing. It doesn't matter if you can access things directly: proprietary means it's not FOSS, that's it.
> Discord can be run in the browser and is accessible via APIs. I think it’s as open as any other web app by a company that has a commercial interest
You need an account to browse Discord, which they can take away from you anytime. If you lose your account you lose your membership to any invite-only communities you belong to, which can be a big deal if you don't have other means to communicate with them to get invited back.
Also, Discord isn't indexable by search engines. So, no there's a big difference between Discord and most web forums.
Also, I don't have anything in particular against Discord (it's miles ahead of Slack in UX for instance, which I hate with a passion), but when people advertise themselves as fans of the old web, and link to their Discord, one can only smirk from the irony.
Kinda weird to start talking FOSS when the website itself never ever claimed to have anything to do with FOSS.
What does search engines indexability have to do with FOSS? There's no shortage of old school forums locked behind membership system, not indexable by any search engines.
Also Discord is an instant messaging software and not "web". It just happens to have a web frontend. It's OK to be nostalgic of the old web but not the old instant messaging softwares.
I started making one for to talk about and share my favorite punk music, but I’m thinking about expanding it to be more personal too.
https://punk.nekoweb.org/
It is pretty similar to Neocities. A little bit of differences are:
- you can style your site box for discovery page
- no limit for file types
and some paid plan differences:
- ftp support
- up to 5 custom domains
- cheaper (you can get 1 custom domain for $1 or 5 and all perks for $3 vs neocities' $5)
This is pretty cool! If I may suggest something, on the explore view, avoid showing most popular (I think it can lead to rote behavior!)
If I may suggest another algorithm, something like picking from most popular to least with probability ~1/(rank+k)^p, where p is any number >1, for example set p=1.5, k=10.
It can be implemented the following way (by computing the integral of the probability distribution):
(1) Have sorted index by popularity with n items
(2) Pick a random (double) r between 0 and 1
(3) The chosen index is (if I did my integrals right;round to nearest integer):
i = ( k^(p-1)*(n-1+k)^(p-1) / ( (r+1)*(n-1+k)^(p-1) - r*k^(p-1) ) ) ^ 1/(p-1) - k
No worries :P It's just a way to try to avoid showing the most popular, instead you'd choose randomly from a curve from most popular to least popular, with the chosen index given by i. An easier idea to understand is to pick randomly from the top say 50 websites instead of just showing the most popular ones, avoiding "winner takes all" effects.
Would really appreciate more documentation (there's also very little documentation on Neocities!), on things like whether (and if yes, how) clean URLs are supported.
From the "donate" page, what exactly do "Endless bandwidth" and "Twice as smaller rate limits" mean? I can't seem to find documentation of the limits for the free tier, so it's difficult to determine what "Twice as smaller" means.
As there are already quite a few services offering free static web hosting, it seems to me what places like Nekoweb and Neocities have to offer is a sense of community and ways for like-minded people to find each other - and in that respect, I've been frustrated with some of Neocities' limitations (like the limit of 5 tags) and apparent lack of interest in developing further. Do you think you'll implement things like a tag cloud, to help people find each other?
And finally, is Nekoweb open source, or will it be?
FTP access is a big factor for me. I currently host some sites on Neocities, and I don't like that I have to use their Web UI/CLI to update them. I really like the overall mission of Neocities though. They seem to be a great host otherwise.
When you say 'FTP', do they mean FTP, or SSH/SFTP?
unfortunately this one expands past my viewport on mobile in all directions and then doesn’t let me scroll horizontally or vertically. i think it’s a pity, considering that even an extremely barebones HTML layout is responsive by default (Motherfucking Website et al.)
Cats power >^÷^< . Algorithms can be helpful, but yep, maybe a blog version? In general Tumblr, Writefreely, I think is not so interested in indexing pages by crawlers. But I have 1$ folks)
The Internet Archive offers a tool whose entire purpose is to let you search gifs scraped from GeoCities. Here's a search for "under construction", eat your heart out: https://gifcities.org/?q=under+construction
There's a delightful irony in the fact that such a page would absolutely have murdered a browser from its era. Nevertheless, these remind me of a different internet and scratch one heck of a nostalgia zone.
That was a real hoot to scroll through. Thank you!
And then there's "PAUCI." (People Against Under Construction Images.) I guess their hard work, dedication, and commitment to the cause finally paid off.
https://www.andrews.edu/~rickyr/noconst.html
I think there is an important thing that many of us miss: while people who did their homepages in the 90s were truly web innovators connecting to communities of other like-minded individuals via websites, nowadays it's nothing but nostalgia or worse yet, teenagers in their romantic phase roleplaying as... IDK, someone who is saddened by the eternal September.
> people who did their homepages in the 90s were truly web innovators connecting to communities of other like-minded individuals
> teenagers in their romantic phase roleplaying as... IDK, someone who is saddened by the eternal September.
I mean, a lot of the people creating homepages in the 90s were teenagers. It ended up being pushed out by facebook who's UX was so polished that it trumped the desire for personalisation, but I personally think that kind of thing - a virtual space they can make their own - is still likely to have appeal to young people, and may well make a comeback (albeit perhaps on a smaller scale) now that facebook has pushed everyone away.
that virtual space is on their phones, not on some website. It's an app. And they have been doing this for about a decade. There's no going back to the Web 1.0. Those days are gone. Saddled by corporations and laws and governance and greed. Now, it's an autobahn to fast cash, narcissistic content creators, award-winning ones too, decentralization, digital-byte-ponzi-schemes, and front-end developers creating 100,000 more packages then they have customers. Now, it's all about the stars baby!
You may be right, but it was always there. It's not like it's coming back. Sure, some people may create things that resemble the old web but the old web is still out there, getting it's AARP card.
My memories of early 2000s internet are from when I was a young age, and are now growing distant in memory…
That said, most of the internet then felt very informal, teenage, and “cringy”. Being a computer nerd back then was actually weird, at least all the way through high school (late 2000s for me) Normal society called you a “geek” and a “loser” for being a net surfer.
People with rose-tinted glasses of those times are imagining something other than what I remember, though
If this is ad free and free to publish on, what’s the monetization strategy? What the benefit to using Nekoweb over publishing static content to S3/CloudFront?
> If this is ad free and free to publish on, what’s the monetization strategy?
Why does this matter? If they can provide 99% uptime for the service they provide, I don't care.
> What the benefit to using Nekoweb over publishing static content to S3/CloudFront?
This is the attitude that kills the net. Sends of the vibe "It's not on AWS so it must not be used, don't you dare".
What the benefit of to using S3/CloudFront?
I suppose it all boils down to that folk not knowing the old internet. The understanding where you relied on hosting companies to provide webspace with an banner, or paid-so webspace that's now lost in today "innovative" world.
One day the clouds will fall, and your site will be with it.
I guess the reason to ask about monetization is because you want to know how long a host is going to exist. Knowing how they plan to make money is a part of knowing the answer to that. As you say, it used to be good enough to have a space and accept there was an ad banner…but if no banner, then how?
That's the beauty of static websites, you don't need to care. If it was full fledged stack-enabled apps for an important function then yeah, sure.
With static, if it dies tomorrow you take the raw html files and move it elsewhere. Sure, it's an inconvenience, but it's the same as to why you don't use a second hand eBay server for commercial piece of kit. I learnt that the hard-way.
> One day the clouds will fall, and your site will be with it.
...what?
S3 launched in '06 and is coming up on 20 years of being a thing. At this point it's had a stronger/longer lifespan - and will likely continue to do so - than pretty much any of the old net hosting sites.
OP was clearly just asking why bother using something like this over <insert your choice of host here>. The only real answer is that you want to do something different - and that's totally fine.
> S3 launched in '06 and is coming up on 20 years of being a thing. At this point it's had a stronger/longer lifespan - and will likely continue to do so - than pretty much any of the old net hosting sites.
Many providers nowadays have existed long before S3, 1&1 (now know as ionos) are another.
So? My server has had just four years uptime that's not including all my other servers I've been hosting since the age of 13. I can service exactly the same as to what S3 can do. I just don't have £LOL fund where I can invest in providing back-end infrastructure like the corp can do.
I foresee it to likely continue to do so in to the future, I even have strategy plans for it when I pass away.
...yeah, the point wasn't that you have a server that's been alive that long. The point is that your bit about "the clouds will fall" is needlessly hyperbolic. S3's been around just as long and has no signs of just dying off.
Why do people on HN always assume people create projects for capital? Lots of cool projects are simply hobbies (and they avoid the enshittification cycle that way, too)
