Neocities: Create your own free website(neocities.org)
80 pointsby Tomte4 hours ago11 comments
  • ivan_gammel3 hours ago
    It is weird that neither About, nor Terms or Contact pages mention who actually is behind this project. No name, no clear legal status, but collecting money and personal data of users. It may be a well-known service, but the number of users does not make it more trustworthy.
    • nicolas_2 hours ago
      You can find lots of articles online about its founder. He’s even on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445181
    • simoncionan hour ago
      > It is weird that...

      Doesn't strike this USian at all as weird. This describes most online entities that I interact with. Plus, there's always the site's contact form that you can use to ask for the information you want.

      What makes me trust it a whole lot are this triplet of facts

      1) AFAICT, neither their privacy policy nor their terms of service have been changed in more than a decade.

      2) They do not require you to give up your right to access the courts in order to use their service.

      3) The backend code is open source.

  • president_zippy2 hours ago
    I absolutely love neocities, I use it to host my goatse mirror (goatse.live).
    • cryo322 hours ago
      A friend of mine wanted somewhere to host goatse for random QR codes he’s planning of sticking everywhere. Problem solved :)
      • president_zippyan hour ago
        By God, that's on another level. I'd be honored to have QR codes stuck to random walls and doors all over major cities linking to my shock site mirror!
  • CM303 hours ago
    Have to be honest, while I like the concept of these services, I've never really found the motivation to use them. If I'd came across Neocities in the 90s or 00s I'd have been all over it, but it's hard to justify today when I'm already paying for web hosting elsewhere. It's like, if a more powerful solution exists elsewhere, I struggle to work within the limitations of a more restrictive one.
    • flyingshelf3 hours ago
      You said it yourself: you're already paying. Lots of people don't want to pay, so they use this for their hobby.
    • skrebbel3 hours ago
      You're not the target audience. My son is 13 and has his own website, started to learn HTML when he was 11. All I did was tell him about Neocities (and allow him to sign up) and he figured out the rest.
      • zeeZ2 hours ago
        This is very similar to how I started out almost thirty years ago. Static files, a complicated JavaScript navigation, maybe even entirely flash based! Not everyone needs a hyperscaler!
    • 3 hours ago
      undefined
    • j45an hour ago
      The majority of folks won't be setting up their own web-hosting, and this can fit them.

      We have to remember that everything doesn't have to be for everyone to be valid or reasonable.

  • cellular3 hours ago
    Can i add software for people to download?

    It seems dropbox is the only free solution but they make it look like you need to register to download (Dark pattern?).

    • Cyberdog2 hours ago
      You can host arbitrary files on it but Neocities isn't really intended as a file host along the lines of Dropbox. It's more for hosting general-purpose web sites.
  • alliao4 hours ago
    awww geocities how much have world changed since, it was an era of stranger danger don't get in strangers car world. It was about connection online however, no matter who they are, post your corner of the world online for all to see, hoping to strike up some connection. It was about tiny pictures, midi files because we have no bandwidth. We were optimistic, eager, and already had to filter out the paedophiles by pretending to be a 60/f/china. I miss the era for sure, the optimism especially, we truly believed internet would bring so much progress, world peace wasn't even that far away even.

    To get a hint of the backdrop.. https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/1993-rabin-and-ar...

  • malwrar3 hours ago
    One of my personal faves on that site: fauux.neocities.org
    • soundworlds2 hours ago
      Hah, I was just deep diving into Serial Experiments Lain. Cool site!
  • soundworlds2 hours ago
    Neocities is one of the few websites I go to restore my faith in the future of the internet - it's the healthiest online creative community I've come across!
  • viccis2 hours ago
    If only a cynical Frenchman had written a book critiquing peoples' tendency towards simulating things that don't exist.

    Neocities is cool, but the medium is the message and we've generally moved on from this (treasured!) past. Any attempt to replicate it tends to wind up hyperreal and forced.

  • spwa44 hours ago
    Does it even properly implement the <blink> tag?
  • alex1138an hour ago
    The death of Districts kills me. As far as I know this was baked into the origin Geocities (Yahoo, why the fuck did you buy it and then shut it down? albeit, 10 years later, but still). Neocities? It was a page someone made, and it's now a spinning rat image because of one tantrum or another