Neocities, Bluesky, and the revival of the Old Net
It sometimes feels silly to long for something from your past. After all, the point of our existence is continued living - we’re intended to continue down our linear path as time flows past us like a river. Going against that river is often ill-advised.
Luckily, these notions do not apply to the Internet. In many ways, the Old Net is still around - self-hosted websites, email clients, and even IRC chats have been around for decades, and have shown no sign of going away. Many of us grew up with the Old Net as a staple of the “new” - an interconnected digital landscape designed by us, for us. I was both an early and latecomer to this world; I missed the MySpace days by just a hair, but I was there for the birth and development of YouTube as it grew into an insanely vast platform. I spent a lot of time in IRC chats, namely revolving around ARGs (shout out to OTP-22), and was a user of (and you aren’t allowed to make fun of me for this, I was a 12 year old at the time) the early My Little Pony chat site, Cloudsdale. I learned a lot of things from my early, mostly unrestricted access to the internet, and it’s shaped my perspective of it for a long time.
City in the Ground
It’s likely that if you’re reading this, you know what Geocities was. For those of you that don’t, here’s a copy-paste from it’s Wikipedia article:
GeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was named Beverly Hills Internet briefly before being renamed GeoCities. On January 28, 1999, it was acquired by Yahoo!, at which time it was reportedly the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.
This doesn't even come CLOSE to being able to surmise its impact on the world or the Old Net, but it does provide you with the necessary context to understand the world that I was growing up in. My education and upbringing was ultimately shaped by the advent of the New Net that we know and struggle with today, but was influenced largely by the presence of the Old Net. I went to a charter school, and in California, this can mean one of two things; either you’re one of the “special” kids, or your parents have lost faith in our existing education system. I believe I was actually BOTH. I tested into the GATE program when I was god knows how old, and was in a special class for “more advanced students” for most of my upbringing. When I left elementary school, the choice to move from the large public school I was attending at the time to a smaller, more local charter school was a no-brainer. Charter schools, in many instances, provide a better system for accommodating special needs students, and that did end up helping me as I grew and developed. I’d also like to note that I’m not entirely open about discussing the politics of charter schools, as they’re a hot topic amongst educators. Instead I am simply trying to explain my upbringing with the Internet - bear with me!
The point of telling you all this is to communicate that after my entry into middle school, my life on the internet changed COMPLETELY. Our school had decided to set up Wordpress websites for every single student - this was a BRILLIANT idea, and completely changed my view of the internet. At the time, I was desperate for any kind of control over my presence on the internet, anything to prove that I was my own person. I was dealing with some seriously heavy shit at the time, and I had turned to the internet to cope. Having a website where I could express myself helped me fight off the darkness for a little while, and was crucial to my development.
When I went to college, I discovered that my college offered much the same thing. We were all provided with an FTP page on our school’s domain, which you could use to host websites and HTML snippets. I had a tremendous amount of fun with this, and was one of the few students that fully utilized the feature. Since I dropped out, my access to the server was cut - but my need for a website never ended.
Learning to work on my website taught me so many things; including the existence of the Old Net, which I had missed every so slightly due to my age. Since then, I have felt a strong need to move back to those times; self-hosted websites, silly HTML pages and cat gifs.
You’re a City, Neo!
This is where the hero of our story comes in - Neocities aims to reinvigorate that sense of the Old Net while accommodating many New Net users. Unlike many other web hosts, Neocities is free, easy to use, and is an insanely powerful tool for people to create their own websites with ease. Not only does it enable creation in ways similar to that of the Old Net, it allows people (particularlly young people) to delve in to HTML and website design and building with very little overhead. Created by Kyle Drake , I firmly believe it was created with the Old Net in mind; a place where you can create your own little digital world, for your own digital purposes. And while I don't know the guy personally, someone who can set up and maintain a system like Neocities entirely with the help of opt-in supporters is pretty damn cool in my eyes.
The point of a community is, of course, to communicate - as we lose more and more websites from the Old Net, we have begun to struggle with communication. Unintentionally, we have isolated ourselves in these echo chambers of uninformed communication and digital disparity; a world where the “us” and “them” are clearly defined. The transition to corporate controlled social media has been on a downward spiral (yes, this is a reference) for many years, and we now have an idea of what the end result actually looks like. For years, we have been warned that these platforms will be used to sow discord and chaos throughout our people, and that reality is one we now face. Twitter (I will never, ever call it X) is a perfect example of this; its owner is desperate to paint a picture that the world is as bleak as his heart is. Threads is just the same, full of bots and utterly unusable. Mastodon is dead, and it’s seeming like Bluesky might come out as the rising king of the Late New Net social media wars. I believe that Neocities and Bluesky are fundamentally linked; creating a platform for people to be known by and encouraged for their work.
For those of us that understand how DNS records work, this is a huge opportunity; not only can our unique handle be our domain, but in doing so it drives additional traffic to BOTH websites. This is huge for communication and connection, and really solidifies “our little corner” of the Net, where your digital presence is synonymous with your creative work, and where artists, authors, musicians, poets, and everyone in-between is welcome. This will be invaluable in the fight to retake our lives and to win the minds of those that feel isolated from their communities.
The main takeaway is this - the Old Net never died. It simply evolved and changed with the New Net, becoming part of the digital ecosystem just as Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook are (and used to be). Our goal now should be further protection of these Old Net systems from the hazards of the New Net, such as disinformation networks and grifters. Groups like Bluesky should never be afraid to deplatform those that actively move our society toward ruination - the nazi filth, the christofash scum, and the ever-present narcissistic grifters, all of whom feed and thrive off strife and conflict while protecting their own interests behind the scenes.
A special thanks to Kyle Drake for providing the Neocities service, and to the entire Bluesky team. This is not a sponsored post, I just enjoy writing about stuff that I like. :)
published 11/9/2024 looona.io