Why I Refuse to use Neocities (And Why You Shouldn’t Use it Either)

The 16th of September, 2024

I hate Neocities! I hate it so much! It’s awful, and you should never even think of touching it!!

Ok, so now that I have your attention: I’d like to preface this blog post with the fact that I actually love Neocities as a service. It’s run by what seems to be a pretty cool guy. Its history is interesting in that it sprung up in the death of Geocities to fill the void that was left by its closure; its users publish amazing and creative websites and have a lovely sense of aesthetic that honors their Geocities past while also looking forward. I simply love it.

“But didn’t you just say you won’t use it in that extremely inflammatory opening?”

Yeah, the problem isn’t actually with Neocities at all, the problem is centralization.

“what???”

Look, if I named the article “Neocities and the Woes of the Centralized Web” you wouldn’t have clicked on it.

Anyways, I think the chief reason to avoid Neocities is actually because it’s so popular. The community is huge, and sites there run a very wide spectrum of topics, basically anything you could imagine. It’s become so successful it’s kind of become synonymous with the idea of a personal website, much in the way twitter is with microblogging. I think this is a bit of a problem though.

I think the coolest part of making your own website and browsing your friends is that you’re away from the corporate centralized web. Away from its rules and spying and all that nasty stuff. When money isn’t the focus of the site, users are actually free to post the things they want to or post in the style they want! The decentralized web is just more fun because we don’t have advertisers breathing down our necks, but the biggest boon to the decentralized web is the security and stability that comes with it.

I’ve seen proof of this firsthand on the fediverse. Since everyone hosts their own content and users are hanging out on smaller servers that host people based on interests or preference, one server going down doesn’t take down the network. I think it’d be best if we took a similar approach to our personal sites! Let's avoid a future, where if Neocities shuts down, we instantly lose a library of 90% of all personal sites on the web.

“You also said that stuff about advertisers and spying, but Neocities isn’t bad..”

Yeah, it’s not; it’s actually run by cool people! But we still shouldn’t put all of our eggs in one basket! What happens if Google rolls up to the Neocities team with a multimillion dollar check and buys them out? Even though it’s a wonderful service now, hosting so much stuff there is still risky! Thats just the risk that comes with having a single centralized service, but corporate buyout woes and decentralization are simply not compatible! Something like some rich dude rolling in and buying out twitter and then ruining it simply can’t happen on the fediverse because its ownership is shared by the great many people who use it.

So what's the solution?

More technical users are already hosting on VPSs or hosting on old computers in their closet, but the casual user (like me) doesn’t actually have a great deal of options. Right now my solution is using Nekoweb (which I love!) but thats not really a one size fits all. I think it’d be really cool if more casual static site hosting services came around that were centered around specific topics, but that's all kinda head in the clouds type thinking…

Basically, my solution is that theres not really a solution, but it’s something to keep in mind.

While we escape the rapidly burning corpo web, let’s not build our paradise in its image.